Melody McGee

Nov 27, 2023 | rdhmag.com | Amanda Hill |Anne Rice |Kristin Evans |Melody McGee

I have a confession: I chose dental hygiene because I thought it would be easy. I had worked as a dental assistant in high school and saw the part-time hygienists raising a family, making good money, and leaving work at work. My parents often brought work home, and I didn’t want that. So off to hygiene school I went, where I quickly realized it was anything but easy—long hours of studying, hunting down patients, and getting crushed by evaluations from professors.

Nov 27, 2023 | rdhmag.com | Olivia Bodunde |Anne Rice |Kristin Evans |Melody McGee

How do you feel when you invest a lot of effort into educating a patient, only to have the doctor say everything looks great? How frustrated are you when you treatment plan a patient for scaling, only to see a coworker choose to perform a prophylaxis on them instead? One of the most frustrating things hygienists experience is having other clinicians discredit their patient recommendations. When such disunity exists in dental teams, confusion and frustration follows.

Nov 24, 2023 | rdhmag.com | Anne Rice |Kristin Evans |Melody McGee |Melissa Van Witzenburg

Editor’s note: This is part four of a four-part interview series with Tim Donley, DDS, MSD. Part one: Dentistry's narrative has failed. How should we change? Part two: 6 questions to get your dental office practicing evidence-based carePart three: What is chronic inflammatory periodontal disease (CIPD)? Anne Rice: Will you speak about the research you are involved in within cardiology? Dr. Donley: Cardiology gets it.

Nov 22, 2023 | rdhmag.com | Kristin Evans |Melody McGee |Melissa Van Witzenburg |Kathryn Gilliam

When I first started dental hygiene school, I learned instrumentation on a typodont. After much practice, I became more confident and knew I would do well as a dental hygienist. Then I encountered a real mouth, and a tongue—a squirmy, large muscle that seemed to inflate and take up all the space in the mouth. Have you ever wished you could take that tongue out of your patient’s mouth during treatment and have clear access to the teeth and gingiva?

Nov 21, 2023 | rdhmag.com | Melody McGee |Emily Fasnacht |Ace Cpt |Yuliana Martinez

After spending so much time and money on your dental hygiene career, it’s critical to invest in yourself by taking care of your mind, body, and soul. Recently, the average career life span of a dental hygienist has been reduced due to occupational stressors, work overload, and, most predominantly, emotional and physical burnout.1 What interventions can be implemented to promote health and wellness for hygienists that will positively impact career longevity?