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We're thrilled to be a part of Nashville Soccer Club as their OFFICIAL DENTIST: Dr. Clark is a longtime soccer player/fan and we look forward to sharing exciting things with you this season. We see athletes of all ages and abilities to not only treat injuries, but to fully optimize dental health and alignment to maximize performance.
Downtown Dental is passionate about total health, overall wellness, and how a healthy mouth impacts the performance of your entire body. As we work with this stellar team of athletes in the 2019 season, we plan to create meaningful content that will hopefully educate and enhance our athlete patients, of any performance level, as well as their coaches and trainers.
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A little selfie-consciousness may be good
One recent study was conducted by NIH-funded researcher Dr. Lance Vernon (Senior instructor, Case Western Reserve University) three dentists from India, another researcher from the United States. They examined the feasibility of using smart phone video “selfies” to help improve toothbrushing technique. The small proof-of-concept study aimed to determine whether toothbrushing with selfie-taking was worth further study. As part of the study, Indian dental students were given a one-time toothbrushing training session. Then over two weeks, they recorded – on their phones in the privacy of their own home – five toothbrushing selfies. Later, the dentist researchers from India reviewed and characterized the selfies. With further analyses from my US colleague, we found some changes and variation over time in the quality and accuracy of toothbrushing. These changes may suggest that participants were trying to create a new habit, trying to change their behavior, almost as if, while taking the selfie, someone was watching them. The thought was that by using selfies, participants were more self-conscious about changing their ingrained toothbrushing approach and so may have been better able to “override” their habitual way of brushing. Also, the participants may have had more fun or been more curious about doing a sometimes mundane task. Habits are hard to change. One needs to overcome “muscle memory” to establish a new behavior. So relearning or retraining, just as with any sports-related skill, may be a gradual process, one prone to trial, error, forgetting and relapse. Some of our data might generally support this. But, based on the pilot study, it seems like adding the selfie to the mix could help people learn, well, new tricks. While it was a very a preliminary study, it opened a door. But keep in mind, it’s not just the taking of the selfie alone. Patients will need to review the selfies with their dentist or dental hygienist to get tips on how to improve and on the most important things to work on. Over time, this new, more effective brushing style could become your default habit. But then, you may need another selfie every so often, to make sure that the patient was not slipping back into old habits. An application of the toothbrushing selfie is that technology could be used to evaluate, monitor and permit providers to give real-time, convenient oral hygiene feedback to people across periods of time. This can help put a greater emphasis on prevention, which, at a minimum, should promote good dental checkups and could help keep costs down. Show us your toothbrushing selfies! We would gladly want to see them. READ MORE ABOUT THE STUDY
The September 2016 Nashville Lifestyles Magazine issue celebrates Nashville's TOP DENTISTS, and we're happy for Dr. Clark to be included in that stellar list!




- Your bite feels off. The TMJ’s position is dictated by where our teeth come together in our bite. So if your bite feels off or your teeth don’t fit together well, there’s a good chance your TMJ joints are off, too.
- You have pain around your forehead, temples, back of head or radiating down your neck. Ninety percent of pain comes from muscle: if your muscles are not functioning well because of fatigue from supporting one or both of your TMJ joints in an improper position, they produce pain. It’s much like when you exercise or work hard and feel muscle pain later. The only difference is that TMJ is more subtle and chronic.
- You have forward head posture. Our heads are supposed to be centered over our shoulders. If yours is in front of your shoulders when you are upright, you have “forward head posture.” That relates to your bite and your airway. The human head weighs about eight to 10 pounds; the farther forward it is off the center axis, the more strain it places on neck muscles and vertebrae.
- You snore. Snoring is a red flag that respiration during sleep is disturbed, Abeles says. Several factors can lead to snoring, but one of the most important is the position of the lower jaw, he says. If your lower jaw is a little too far back, then the tongue is farther back as well.

