Video

Nathaniel Lawson: Well, thank you so much, Sarah, for that introduction. Like Sarah told you, my main thing that I do, usually I go around the country talking about dental materials and telling people how to use these materials to make better looking composites and to make nice looking crowns that are going to last in the patients' mouths for a long time. And a couple of years ago, I came to this realization that all of that was just a huge waste of time if I didn't try to figure out why my patients needed to have those fillings and crowns in the first place and if I didn't do anything to prevent them from needing or from getting new caries and then also from destroying the nice fillings and crowns that I just did with recurrent caries. I always say that this topic of caries risk assessment and prevention is maybe not my content expertise, but it's an area I'm super passionate about teaching.

What I want to talk to you about today is kind of a simplified method of going through and finding a caries risk etiology on our patients, and then also a personalized method to give them prevention strategies to prevent them from not, again, not just getting new caries, but also from destroying the restorations that we just did or the work that we just did in our dental practices from recurrent caries. That's kind of the overview, and as I talk to you today, my background is in research, so usually when I talk, I talk a lot about research studies, and I have some research studies and it's trying to be an evidence-based talk, but I want to like have this conversation with y'all through the internet kind of the same way that I'd be talking to a patient, so kind of in the language of patient conversations.