Covid Precautions List

We hope that you and your family have stayed safe and maintained your sanity during the pandemic. These challenging times have changed our priorities and made it difficult to take care of ourselves the way we might have in the past. Isolation and fear of traveling have made many people put off needed dental care as well as preventive dental care. Untreated, silent dental issues go unnoticed without proper clinical exams and X-rays. These issues get more complex and expensive over time without treatment.

Your oral health also directly affects your overall medical health. Inflammation in your mouth from lack of care creates inflammatory hormones that circulate throughout your body. Decades of medical research has shown that these inflammatory hormones are a major risk factor that contributes to cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, cancers, GI conditions, low birth weight in pregnant women, and a host of other medical conditions. A compromised ability to eat comfortably, especially in older patients, will adversely affect nutritional status, which in turn can cause or aggravate multiple medical conditions. Your mouth is truly the window to your health.

Dental offices are one of the safest indoor environments! Dentistry has been at the forefront of infection control for decades, since the HIV/ AIDS crisis of the ‘80s. Back then, dentistry adopted an approach known as Universal Precautions. This means that all instruments, environmental surfaces and the entire office assumes that every patient is infected and uses the same protocols for sterilization and disinfection as if this were true. Every ethical dental office in the United States has been trained this way and should have already been practicing this for decades. The ADA has recently published a study showing that dentists and dental personnel have less than a 1% positivity rate for COVID-19, proving that these precautions are effective and in use. That doesn’t account for behaviors outside of the office, so the statistics bear out that dental offices are safe.

Please schedule a routine cleaning and checkup to stay healthy!

Drs. Michael Krochak, Joshua Perlman and their entire team of doctors and staff at the NYC Smile Spa take our responsibility to our patients, staff, and ourselves very seriously. Our doors are kept locked, and no one can enter our space without a verbal medical screening questionnaire, a temperature check, and then instructions to wash their hands immediately. This includes any vendors entering our space. We have limited our appointments to maintain social distancing so that, most of the time, you are brought directly into a treatment room with a minimal number or no people in the reception area. The staff is provided with a full complement of PPE equipment, and Universal Precautions, as explained above, are always used.

Our treatment rooms have no doors, and we continually run the HVAC fan to maximize air circulation throughout the office. We have gone above and beyond and also made the investment of placing hospital-grade UV lighting throughout our air duct system that kills 99.9% of viruses and bacteria. Even after COVID-19, we thought this would be a great investment for killing typical cold viruses and germs to increase the level of safety in our office.

A multitude of anecdotal reports are surfacing that COVID-19 may have a direct impact on your oral health. People have been sharing stories on Survivor Corps, a group of COVID-19 survivors who have been reporting medical symptoms that haven’t been widely reported or researched yet. There have been reports of teeth turning gray or becoming loose, increased dental decay, and painful and sensitive gums. These patients had no known oral issues and were seemingly healthy. The founder of Survivor Corps reported that her 12-year-old son, who became sick with COVID-19, had his lower front adult teeth become loose, and one fell out without any bleeding.

Researchers now suspect that the dental deterioration in COVID-19 patients could ultimately be a problem with blood flow. The virus is already known to infect and attack blood vessels. If blood can’t reach our organs, damage occurs. That’s why doctors are starting to see complications within the heart, lungs, intestines, brain and kidneys. The same could be true with the oral cavity. Your jaw is richly fed with blood vessels. Your tongue is highly vascular, and the lack of blood flow could be the reason for the alteration in taste.

Your gums are highly vascularized. The inside of your tooth is the dental pulp, which is packed with blood vessels and nerves. What’s also interesting is that, when the coronavirus infects the body, it latches onto a part of our cells called the ACE2 receptors. These receptors are rich in certain areas of the body, including the lungs (hence the respiratory damage). The mouth, it turns out, is also flush with ACE2 receptors.
There is an intimate connection between your mouth and the rest of your body, so the take-home message here is do not put off preventive dental checkups and take care of any known issues before they get worse.

Yours in health,
Drs. Michael Krochak, Joshua Perlman & the team at the NYC Smile Spa