A Letter From Me to You

Hi, you.

It's me. I'm the person who writes this blog every week for Drs. Johnson and Risbrudt. I'm totally breaking all the rules here, and I'm hoping the fine doctors let me get away with it, because I'm trying to roll with the spirit of the theme this month; gratitude.

First thing I want to say is I'm grateful to Dr. Johnson and his Marketing Specialist, Nicole. They along with their web developer are responsible for putting this blog together, and giving me the opportunity to write the things you see here every month.

It's a pleasure to write, because Drs. Johnson and Risbrudt and the rest of the staff at the office are, every one of them, sparkling. I've heard people say "if you want to be a winner, surround yourself with winners," and I don't know if they did that deliberately, or if it's just a case of like attracting like, but working with them, even as a background character like I am, is a joy.

More than that, I'm grateful to you for reading this blog. This is the end of my first full year writing for Dr. Johnson's office, and every month has been challenging. I'm a writer, not a dentist, and some of these posts have been pretty technical — but I love doing it.

Speaking of which, if you've found any of these posts useful, or overly fluffy, or any such thing, don't be afraid to use the Comments button. I'd love to know more about what you think! You are the ones who make this blog useful to Dr. Johnson, and thus offer me the opportunity to keep writing it.

So thank you. Thank you for reading, thank you for your comments, thank you for visiting Dr. Johnson's office, and thank you for being vigilant about your oral health. Without you, none of us would be here.

Sincerely,

Dr. Johnson's Ghostwriter

Christmastime Is Here! Let's Talk About Pigging Out

At long last, Christmas is once again here! There's a lot of different traditions around the office, but the one thing that it seems everyone can agree with is that Christmastime is a good excuse for a feast. We don't really call them "feasts" anymore, not like in thee olden days, but that's what they are — a vast quantity of food and often an equally vast quantity of desserts waiting to be consumed by people enjoying the holiday.

The question on everyone's mind, because you know this is a dentist's blog, is "I can pig out this one time, right? It's not going to really hurt me in the long run, right?"

To everyone's relief, the answer is yes, you can pig out — if you're already healthy. You can, in fact, 'pig out' on Christmas Eve and/or Christmas Day without doing too much to harm your teeth (or the rest of your body.) Now, if you decide to start pigging out on the 24th and you don't let up until Epiphany, there may be some consequences, but let's look at a single night of pigging out from an overarching scientific perspective.

The human body is kept in equilibrium by a complicated network of counterbalancing forces that are collectively called homeostasis. Homeostasis keeps you at the right temperature, it keeps you at roughly the same weight week-to-week, it makes you sleep when you're tired, and so on.

Homeostatic balance is crucial to the very concept of health, because if your balance is off, you get things like weight gain, sleeplessness, and a weak immune system that can't fight off colds and sickness. Fortunately, homeostatic balance is very good at snapping back from single big pushes. For example, those crazy polar bear swimmers that jump into polar water for a moment or two and then wrap up and get next to a fire.

On the other hand, homeostatic balance is not that good at snapping back from a prolonged imbalance, like getting less than six hours of sleep every night for a week or smoking for years on end.

What this means for you holiday feasters is that, unless your long-term health is already suffering for some other reason, there's absolutely nothing about a single meal — or even 24 consecutive hours — of pigging out that will do any lasting damage to you.

Just be sure that when you're done, you go back to your normal healthy diet-and-exercise routine and give your body oh, say, six days to recover. Then go have a New Years party and do it all over again.

See you next year!

Grinding Your Teeth at Night? A Little Gratitude Might Help

According to some estimates, as many as 95% of Americans will, at some point, have a problem they might never notice — they grind their teeth together at night. Often, the only way someone will notice the problem is if their spouse tells them or if they wake up with an aching jaw.

There are a variety of potential causes that range from the disturbing and highly improbable (parasites in your jaw muscles) to the commonplace and widely accepted (stress in your life). Let's assume in this case that the trigger that makes the most sense to us today — that stress makes you grind your teeth in unconscious frustration at night — is the one that needs the most attention.

What you've just said, essentially, is that reducing stress can improve your dental health by eliminating the grinding problem. Well, there's a lot of advice out there about reducing stress — and almost every modern expert on the subject will tell you that being grateful for the good things in your life is one of the best ways to do it

It doesn't matter if you're grateful to God, grateful to the other people in your life, or simply abstractly counting your blessings, taking a few minutes to consciously acknowledge that you have good things in your life and expressing gratefulness for those things in whatever way best suits you is an amazing way to reduce stress — and thus, if you're a nighttime grinder, reduce the damage you're doing to your teeth as you sleep.

There are several other studies that link a less-stressed, more-grateful life to a systemic boost in overall health, which can in turn improve your oral health, but we wanted to give you at least one cause-and-effect sort of way in which simple gratitude can directly improve your oral health. It's a powerful thing, gratitude — we encourage all of you to use it.

Gratitude Means Giving Back

Drs. Johnson and Risbrudt have always had a strong drive to give back to the community — and to the world. That's why the entire office ran in the Susan G. Korman Run For The Cure, and it's why we strive to do things, small and large, for our community whenever we get the chance.

It's easy, when you're a business, for cynical people to think that anything public you do as a service is some sort of self-centered act. In 2010, when Dr. Johnson gave the world's tallest man, Sultan Kosen, a smile makeover at no cost, several people called it a publicity stunt — but nothing could be further from the truth. There were other specialists, labs and professionals that were involved to make it happen.

The fact is — Dr. Johnson's wife Christa saw a documentary on Kosen and heard that, because of his pituitary disorder, his jaw had literally outgrown his teeth. He needed profound dental work, but he was from a poor village in Turkey and couldn't afford it. Dr. Johnson understood that there was an opportunity to give service to someone who had a profound need and no means, so he stepped up to the plate.

In 2010 Dr. Johnson lead a team of USC students on a mission trip to Honduras. In 2011 he lead them on a mission trip to El Salvador and in 2012 to Guatemala.

Every once in a while we reach out to a patient unexpectedly with a card or another gesture because it is in our hearts to do so. When we receive a response then it confirms why we do what we do. We give from our hearts and our hopes is that our patients know and feel it all the same. But that's hardly the only way that our office works to give back to our community — we also love to go the extra mile for our patients. It's one thing to participate in charitable events or give our services to those in need — but sometimes giving back can be as simple as reaching out to touch the people we meet that need moral support.

Every once in a while, we get a response like this one, and it just redoubles the fuzzy feeling we get when we reach out to someone. Jason's grandmother had just died, and we got together and sent him a condolences card that we all signed — a small enough act, but it sparked something in him that made him write back.

We don't do it for those letters that come back, but we always love it when they do. It's how we know that we're on the right track — giving back to our patients, our community, and our world.