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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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We understand that dental care needs to be affordable, especially for families. We also know that many companies have cut back on dental benefits or even cut them out entirely. Even if you have dental insurance, you may be concerned about your out-of-pocket expenses, so we make every effort to lighten your financial burden.
Our House Dental Plan is an alternative for families, individuals or businesses that want excellent dental coverage without the barriers of traditional insurance. The program is designed for patients without dental insurance, as well as insured patients who may be looking for a better option.
Downtown Dental’s house plan gets you savings similar to what people with insurance get without the limitations. Our house plan encourages more preventative treatment so that you can avoid expensive, time consuming, painful restorative treatment later on. Because our plan doesn’t have annual limits, you won’t be pressured to risk your health by waiting for the next year to roll around so that you have money in your account again.
No more cutting corners on your wellness: Downtown Dental’s In-House Plan is one way to make dental care affordable for the whole family.
3 WAYS TO SIGN UP
- Sign up online by clicking here.
- Next time you're in the office, let a DD staff member know you'd like to join.
- Call our office at (615) 254-1393 to have our administrative staff assist you over the phone.
You may see a familiar face in the September 2017 issue of Nashville Lifestyles Magazine! We're thrilled to have Dr. Clark listed among the TOP DENTISTS of Nashville. This ranking system is cool because it's ranking done by fellow colleagues: consider it a way for the dental community to comment on the top doctors in their industry. It's like a clinical high five! Click on the photo to expand or pick up your own copy at the news stand!
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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!
We were recently reading a Spear Digest post by Imtiaz Manji where contributor Dr. Gary DeWood stated, “remember, dental insurance doesn’t exist.”
What does this mean, considering all the energy and resources the average practice devotes to working with patients’ dental plans, dental insurance sure feels like a reality to most dentists?
The point Gary is making is that dental insurance is quite simply not insurance, in the true sense of the word. It’s not like home insurance or auto insurance, where you pay a premium in exchange for blanket coverage in the event of losses or expenses. If dental insurance were really insurance, patients would submit their claims for all necessary work that needed to be done and be fully reimbursed (minus an agreed-upon deductible).
But that’s not how dental plans work. What dental plans offer are benefits – a limited allowance to go towards funding dental care costs, which is a different thing. These are indeed useful and valuable benefits to patients and it is perfectly understandable that dental practices would want to help patients manage and maximize their benefits. But it is also important that patients are not fooled by the term “insurance” to the point where they have false expectations. The best advice seems that dental practices should not use the word “coverage” when talking about dental plan benefits.
Similarly, we in the dental community, as Gary keeps reminding us, should stop thinking in terms of “insurance.” That’s a word that dental plan providers use. It’s a mindset trap, one we should not fall into.
Great dentistry comes at a cost. If that cost can be offset by a patient's benefit plan, great. But we can’t allow ourselves – or patients – to let these allowances govern treatment decisions. Because that’s what they are: allowances, benefits, economic supplements. It is not insurance. Because dental insurance does not exist.
source: Spear Education
Nearly everyone on occasion experiences a throbbing headache that interferes with concentration at work or school, or saps the joy from the day.
But sometimes the source of that headache can be surprising. For many people, the pain that emanates from the head can be traced back to their teeth, their bite relationship and the alignment of the lower jaw.
With many headaches, the cause could be the temporomandibular joint, or TMJ: the place at the front of the ear where the lower jaw and the temporal bone on the side of the head meet.
Sometimes the bite and the lower jaw are out of alignment, putting additional strain on muscles, which leads to the headaches. And for many, TMJ headaches aren’t going away because people try to mask the pain with medication rather than correct the underlying cause.
But how do you know a headache is caused by TMJ? Here are a few things to watch:
- 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.
Here's a rundown of our hours for the next two weeks:
CLOSED: 12/24 and 12/25
Regular hours 12/28 - 12/30 (admin day only on 12/31)
CLOSED New Year's Day
If you have a dental emergency, call our office and the emergency line is listed on the voicemail. We wish you a wonderful holiday season!
You may see a familiar face in the September 2015 issue of Nashville Lifestyles Magazine! We're thrilled to have Dr. Clark listed among the TOP DENTISTS of Nashville. This ranking system is cool because it's ranking done by fellow colleagues: consider it a way for the dental community to comment on the top doctors in their industry. It's like a clinical high five! Click on the photo to expand or pick up your own copy at the news stand!