Education Bolivia Project #7925

Help Dental Hygiene Students Make Bolivia Smile!

by Smiles Forever

Project Report | Sep 10, 2018
Bolivia Welcomes Shoreline CC Hygienist Students

By Nancy Clark | Project Leader

Tooth Fairy Adela with Kellie

Smiles Forever Bolivia welcomes Shoreline, Washington community college dental hygienist students:

This longterm early fall 3rd-World opportunity for students entering the 2nd year of dental training has been a great success over the years. It is something students and sponsoring SCC and accompanying dental instructor look forward to from day one. The rewards are so great as enthusiasm fuels learning both in Bolivia and back home. Many students come away with inspiration to last a lifetime.

Lucky Shoreline Students take part in UPAL first ever joint demonstration:

This group of aspiring dental hygienists will have so much to remember! They are part of the history-making cooperation between Smiles Forever's dental training in Bolivia and the university level program in what we would call a technial community college. Sharon Golightly who has been instrumental in writing curriculm for Smiles Forever, demonstrates scaling procedure.

The rest of the tooth fairy story:

For those of you who have been following along with prior stories, Kellie had traveled to Bolivia last spring as a tooth fairy ambassador. She is currently one of our newest and most active Smiles Forever Board members. This past month, she helped with music & dance planning for what promises to be our most fun auction coming Oct. 20th--Noche del Gaucho. Our donors are encouraged to wear boots & pampas-inspired neck scarves. Therefore, Kellie will not be wearing her usual princess dress and tooth fairy tiara.

The Tooth Fairy in Bolivia...continued:

My time with Smiles in the Chapare further convinced me that silver diamine fluoride works. While working at the school, Dr. Steven Duffin shared with us the history of SDF, research related to its use, and his clinical experience with it. Dr. Duffin’s mentoring was invaluable. I use SDF in my independent senior focused practice so I have seen for myself how this antibiotic liquid turns soft, active decay into hard, arrested lesions. However, my senior patients are at the end of their lives, so I rarely get to monitor these areas for more than a year. This is where Smiles Forever helped me to see the longer term effects of the application of SDF on a carious lesion.
Smiles has been providing assessments and SDF with fluoride varnish every six months for the last 18 months at the time I was there. Chart after chart showed rampant, active decay written in red pencil at initial visits. These areas were treated with SDF and fluoride varnish. Six and 12 months later, these areas were charted in blue pencil as hard, arrested lesions. If this wasn’t amazing enough to witness documented over and over again, there were very few new active areas of decay noted in the hundreds of children we saw. How is it that there was almost no new decay in a population where sugary snacks and soda pop are less expensive than bottled water and there has been very little dietary or oral hygiene behavior modification efforts? If I hadn’t seen the rampant amount of caries in a state of arrest for myself, I would have thought the data to be exaggerated. I will never forget how such a small drop of an inexpensive liquid made such a massive positive impact. And without local anesthetic, a drill, or sedation, I might add.
I have mentioned that registered dental hygienists are prevention specialists. Our training has also made us critical thinking experts. I have seen first-hand the epidemic of early childhood caries, in the jungle of Bolivia and in my own and neighboring counties. For the children who suffer from its pain, days missed in school, and for some, death, I am left with the uncomfortable question to ask: are we doing our job well enough? There is no better time than the present to return to our roots of caries prevention, especially while having SDF at our fingertips. The Smiles Forever community outreach program is an excellent model of how caries can be arrested in oral health related programs, right here where we live.
The Tooth Fairies aim to do just that. Even prior to my own experience with Smiles Forever, Elise had inquired about implementing SDF applications within our ECEAP sites. Although we have been met with firm opposition, we will continue to advocate for its use in our school based program. In the meantime, I created an informational brochure about SDF for the families of the children we serve. By bringing awareness to this treatment option, our hope is that parents will begin to ask their dentists for it. We have also compiled a list of dental offices in our region that offer SDF as a treatment option and we provide this resource to all of the student’s families we see.
This last Fall, dressed as a Tooth Fairy in a local ECEAP site, I saw my first official baby tooth that had been treated with silver diamine fluoride. There have been a handful of other children that have been treated with SDF to follow, and I anticipate seeing more with each classroom visit. I view these small beginnings as a tell-tale sign that dentistry is changing, and I am once again humbled to not only witness it, but be a part of it.

September Opportunity with GlobalGiving Offers 33 hours of percentage matching to Smiles Forever donors beginning midnight Sept. 12th Washington, D.C. time--this means this campaign would end at 6:00 p.m. the next evening Seattle time.

Help Bolivia with Smiles Forever or Choose to Help the World: Pictured India

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Bolivian girl treated at Bolivian University

Dr. Duffin teaching moment with Bolivian youth

Speaker at Bolivian Univ. ceremony with S. Kemper

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