Episode 156 – Treat the Disease Not Just the Damage (Part 2) with Dr. Kim Kutsch

“We have patients saying ‘can I just use this every day for the rest of my life?’” -Dr. Kim Kutsch

Do you want what’s best for your patients?

That might seem like a silly question but take a moment to think about it. If you knew a way to drastically improve the lives of your patients – if you could help them treat the disease and not just repair the damage from the disease – would you do it? 

If you’re like most dentists, you went into this profession to help people. To make their lives better and healthier. 

Which is why we are beyond excited to bring you the second part of our conversation with CariFree founder and dental caries expert, Dr. Kim Kutsch. 

We promised we were going to get geeky today, and oh boy do we deliver. Join us for a deep dive into the science of caries prevention and real-world results for your patients and business, including:

• What a 2008-2010 clinical study showed when patients used a CariFree treatment rinse vs. standard fluoride 
• How getting patients disease-free turns them into evangelists for your practice
• How to communicate with and educate patients on risk factors

Never miss an episode! Subscribe on iTunes & Spotify. Visit us at http://www.everydaypracticespodcast.com

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Kim Kutsch
So anyway, that’s, that’s

Dr. Chad Johnson
a couple of nerd questions. Number one, the FDA, from what I understand the FDA, you laugh as soon as I say the FDA,

Dr. Kim Kutsch
okay, so we might have to edit this part out.

Dr. Chad Johnson
I was gonna say that was such

Dr. Kim Kutsch
the FDA, the FDA is my life existence now, I wouldn’t necessarily say I mean, there are days I feel that way but no, they’ve been here’s my question, go ahead.

Dr. Chad Johnson
The 10 milliliter suggested, you know, rants or whatever, for a CT X for is 10 milliliters, if effectively necessary, or to what I tell patients and tell me if I’m wrong, or if you would modify, you know, one way or the other, I tell them, Listen, they have to have a certain unit of measurement, you know, and there’s probably a minimal measurement. I think, you know, you take a water spit and you’ve got two milliliters, you don’t need to do 10 milliliters at a time and then, therefore, you can make that bottle last five times longer by using two milliliters more often than using 10 milliliters and trying to use it like gold once a day or every other day.

Dr. Kim Kutsch
Yeah. You know, that’s an interesting question that you’re asked Chad and I would say it that hasn’t been studied.

Dr. Chad Johnson
No. Nor could it, I’m sure. But

Dr. Kim Kutsch
Well, other than you probably could study it most of the studies that have been done on certainly on sodium hypochlorite as rents have involved frequency of use and percentage of sodium hypochlorite in the solution. Not really and maybe how frequently they use it during the week and not really looking at you know, well it’s five milliliters as effective as 10 is two milliliters effective. Well, I guess I would say 10 milliliters is optimum, I would tell patients, you could certainly probably get by with five and look at this, I tell patients that if it burns, and you can’t tolerate it, dilute it half and half of water, so five miles and add five mils of plain water, because that’s still better than not having it at all.

So any use of that as a, you know, antimicrobial agent, if that’s appropriate for that patient, any use of it all is better than no use, right? So it might take longer, you know, to have to convert their biofilm. Instead of, you know, six months, it might take 12 I mean, it might take longer, but I think you can achieve an outcome with that, you know, that way, it was interesting. We did a clinical trial back in 2008 through 2010 in Townsville, Australia. We never got to really publish this data because our results were so far outlier.

The success that journalists were afraid to, I mean, literally, people were afraid to publish it but it was a really well done great people that did conduct this study. They, you know, carried Hallett, he’s now you know, Chief dental officer, you know, and one of the provinces in Australia. We took these two grade schools that were high risk for dental caries, on average, Downsville is, is a non-fluoridated, rural kind of community in Queensland and so here’s these kids that are averaging two new cavities per school year per kid and so all we did was treatment rents, supervised rents for 30 seconds, four times a week, they’re in school, just four days a week, nine months out of the year, there was nothing else we didn’t teach them anything else.

There was no counseling, there was nothing. All we did was just have them use the rents at school and then if you didn’t, then we had them. The control group, you know, you know, certainly you can’t take those kids that have the disease and not offer them some treatment, you can’t just give them water, because that’d be unethical. So we gave them just a standard point, oh, 5% fluoride grants, and the outcome was that the standard rinse reduce their caries by about 30%, which is pretty standard for most of your fluoride studies, you know, in children, and we extrapolate that data to adults, but whether it’s fluoride toothpaste, or fluoride grants, or whatever it is, you know, most of the data I can cite, it all falls in that 28 to 32% kind of range. The CDC says that I think that prevented fraction of cavities on primary teeth is 28%.

On permanent teeth, it’s only 12%. But on the the the wing, the test wing that we did, with the treatment rents reduced 30k rate by 73% and then on top of that, it continued to improve like, see what when I first started using the, you know, the, we developed the CTS for rent, you know, I figured it was like a 30-day treatment, or maybe three months, or maybe at the most six months. Those kids continue to improve for two years. Like and that was a real mindset change for me that this wasn’t a kind of a, you know, take one failure, you’re, you’re cured. Yes. Like this was a two-year process.

Now, we did the study for three years, there was no additional improvement between two years and three years but there was a continued improvement for two years and so that in my mind really changed the concept. Or, you know, for me of like changing biofilms this is a long and be along with their behavior. Is this a long-term kind of proposition? It’s not an overnight thing. So when you start talking about those two milliliters, you can stretch the bottle out. Yeah, you can do that. Think about this might you know, for the patient, this might be something that you might take us a couple of years to get this completely turned around.

Dr. Chad Johnson 8:54
That’s what I learned at kois two, because, you know, first you guys were selling these little bottles. Yeah and I was trying to push the info up, you know, to reach to you or someone that is just like, Listen, I want gentleman’s I want liter stuff, you know, and so you find guys finally give the AB pumps, right? And I’ve been using that at home and I’ve been using it twice a day and I’m trying to think if it was February, so I’m thinking four months in, right, you know, of using that and that’s been really good. Yeah.

Dr. Kim Kutsch
And I would say I have patients ask, Well, can I just use this like everyday for the rest of my life? And it’s like, well, there’s no you know, there’s no reason you can’t there. You know, sodium hypochlorite has no adverse effects. It doesn’t you know, create any persisters. I mean, there’s no downside to do that if you if you want to, right.

Dr. Chad Johnson
And it helps with not just perio but caries as well. Oh, is what you’re saying. Three for the caries patients but so what how do you distinguish between using C TX for C TX three.

Dr. Kim Kutsch
So what I do for I’ve well if you’re using it for pairing You’re using it off label. Um, you say that which you certainly have the ability to do as eBay as a practitioner, as a manufacturer, because I don’t have FDA marketing clearance or that I can’t promote or tell you to do that. Right. Got

Dr. Chad Johnson
it but somebody says to let’s just say let’s,

Dr. Kim Kutsch
yeah, well, John can say whatever he wants, right, so let’s just

Dr. Chad Johnson
throw him under the bus and say that there are leaders that say, to use it for perio and I’ve had good results.

Dr. Kim Kutsch
Yeah. All right. Well, if you look at the research, I mean, you’re gonna splotched has done most of that clinical work. It’s better than anything else. You can cite results on the eye in terms of outcomes for periodontal disease, so but after dental caries, it’s also I can’t even cite the next best study that’s ever been done. They had data was 40% reduction in dental caries rate on it was the exact study on Xylitol where they gave him Xylitol news.

However, it was when they did a secondary analysis on their own data, which the original data on the entire subject group showed no outcome but when they hand-picked out just the people that had class five lesions, you know, just root decay, those five Xylitol mints a day, that was the entire treatment, five Xylitol minutes a day, no educational counseling, nothing else, five Xylitol minutes a day, reduced the decay rate in that group by 40%. And that’s the second highest outcome that I can cite in dental caries.

So, you know, when we start talking about, you know, the outcomes of dental caries, I have a really strong confidence. The way that I use it is I use the ATP, you know, bioluminescence meter, if they have a highly active or a high bacterial load microbial load in the mouth, along with, you know, lesions with delicate areas, then I’m going to use an antimicrobial strategy and you know, mine would be the CTS for rooms. If they don’t have like, if they have a low ATP score, well, they don’t really have a biofilm issue they got maybe they don’t have enough saliva, or they’ve got a dry mouth, or maybe they’re eating too much sugar, but it’s not necessarily a biofilm issue. So I’m not going to put them on an antimicrobial agent.

It’s like if you got a viral infection, it doesn’t do any good to put you on an antibiotic, right? Right now and antiviral works, right but that’s kind of how I look at that. Something else I was going to tell you about, oh, and so we listened to Chad, we listened, we heard you, and there are larger bottles coming out. Just in the new packaging, both for the tubes and the bottles. We’re in the process of and that’s been a six-year journey, but we’re in the process right now manufacturing those and releasing things in the next 30 days.

Dr. Chad Johnson
I think anything just for dentists dispensation, I mean, I want to dispense it, you know, yeah, I don’t want to put out Listerine but this kind of stuff I believe in so yeah,

Dr. Kim Kutsch
and certainly the pre-rinse, you know, the AB pre-rinse you know, in the 16-ounce bottles, certainly that’s what I I added my practice or would have in my practice today to dispense right and to hand out to the patients. I can’t tell you how big the new bottles are off the top of my head, but they’re like 50% larger, so they’ll easily last a month.

The one thing I was going to tell you and this was a study that I think I passed on, I think it was published like two years ago I can 2020 But it was a it was a study involving Florida you know standard lavender or purple, your fluoride toothpaste and they were looking at fluoride retention in both the saliva and in the biofilm after you brush your teeth with fluoride toothpaste, and what they found was it was dose related, and the optimum dose of your standard off the shelf. Lemon or 5 million florid fluoridated dentifrice was two centimeters. It literally filled the brush with toothpaste and it made a difference in the fluoride retention and outcome. You know, so I’m always thought

Dr. Chad Johnson
he is sending me that’s not exactly a volume measurement.

Dr. Kim Kutsch
No, but as wet as you squeezed out the tube, they measured it linearly. Yeah, but but it was but that was that’s how they measured in the study but it did make it you know, it was dose-related in terms of for the fluoride.

Dr. Chad Johnson
So the fresh wins the de Haan the old you know,

Dr. Kim Kutsch
but so anyway, you know, I’d always tell patients, you know, the CTS for, you know, 5000 parts per million gel. You only need to use like a pea size on your brush, and I still advocate that and then that to that tube should last you a month. If you’re using a couple times a day. You should get a month out of that. Oh, yeah but the one thing that Brian I love from from Brian Novi is, you know, leave the phone alone. Like so when you’re done at night. you, Brett, you know, Instead of rinsing your mouth out if you rent your mouth out after use the 5000, you just reduced the Effect universe down to 1100. part per million. Yes, Joe, right. This is something. Yeah, well, yeah,

Dr. Chad Johnson
I didn’t know that and I don’t mean that as the point but like, it doesn’t rinse it to zero. That’s interesting. Yeah, I normally tell people I mean, you just washed the medicine that you just purposely put on your teeth off.

Dr. Kim Kutsch
Yeah. So So here’s his comment. I mean, his praises leave the farm alone and I’m like, you know, that’s a great phrase. At night, you know, last thing you do is brush spit, and don’t rinse, just leave it alone and leave that on your teeth and yeah, I think that’s a great is a great catchphrase for people to you know, they can remember that, you know, it’s kind of sticky and viral. All right.

Regan
So, as a patient, well, you know, my mind has been blown this whole time and Dr. Kutsch, we’re like, Oh, I know, it’s like seeing a celebrity in person, you and Dr. kois? No, it really is, it’s really true. Because as a patient, I’d been in the experience where I have comprehensive health care, where the doctor has the time and the communication ability to explain what’s going on underneath the surface.

The reason I’m wearing a questi programmer today, it’s it was a journey for me, thankfully, a doctor Wade Keifer, who’s heavily involved in kois. Me, in addition to my own doctor, Dr. Gray, who is a coiste. Doctor and it took me a while to understand what they were trying to explain to me because I thought, well, I have this grinding issue going on and one doctor previously had told me that he could build back this tooth kind of that started to wear down a little bit, but he wasn’t going to do it, because I would just break it off again and the conversation ended there. Like there was no, why are we grinding it down?

What is causing this issue and so I’m thrilled to be on this journey and where I’m super passionate about it is how to get this into this information into patients hands and onboarded and having the why me book is an exceptional tool like dentists can go out, they can buy it, and they can hand it out, I think, Chad to your testament to having the rents and talking about the rinse, like not just having it in the bathroom or whatever, but doing it during the appointment and explaining it. That’s another great reason or a great way for people to learn. What other ways have you seen from a marketing perspective and a communication perspective, that successful doctors that have been carefree in the practice are doing

Dr. Kim Kutsch
to get the word out? Oh, I think you know, it’s really, I don’t know that people are marketing it heavily. Right. I think it’s in No, that’s a really interesting question. Regan and I would say, I just looked at the company itself and for years, we tracked where our new dental offices came from, how did they hear about us? And then and now it’s gotten to the point it’s grown organically, there’s like, people don’t even know, you know, they call it I don’t know where I heard about it, but I just heard I keep hearing about it. So I wanted to order it and, and patients will like it just growing it. I wouldn’t say it’s gone viral yet. I would love to have that happen but it’s growing organically from the standpoint of like they read a review or something they have no idea about. They just you know, suddenly we have all these new customers that we’re having a hard time trying to identify where they come from and I think that is one of the things that happens in a prep practice.

Now, this happened in my practice, I can tell you that when you take somebody who has chronic decay, and they’ve had it for a very long time, and there’s so much baggage and shame associated with cavities, I mean, and ugly teeth with holes in a ring, and I’ll talk to you about what I’m going why I’m going through what I’m going through at the moment, but which I didn’t really appreciate and but once you take one of those patients, and you get them to decay free, and then you go on to restore and give them a beautiful smile, which last which I mean I’ve got 16-year follow-ups on patients that I’ve restored that and if you looked at it before, I’m there to indicate for you for 16 years, and the dentistry is held up and it’s beautiful, right and those patients have become evangelists for your practice. I mean, it’s like they’re like, recommending you word of mouth on steroids and the thing is, they know who all the people are, who are like them.

They either have dental fear, or they’ve suffered from dental caries, like their entire life and they’re embarrassed by their smile. I mean, they know who those people are, and they tell them, oh, oh, you’ve got to go see this dentist, right. You’ve got to go to this place. Because this person can help you. Look at me, right and it’s like they can help you and suddenly you get inundated with these people that have all this disease. I mean, I literally I, I didn’t think that much disease existed in my community and suddenly these people all started coming to me, and they were all referred by patients that I had helped and so you continue, I mean, I didn’t really actively do any marketing, it was my patients that you know, did the marketing for me and, and that word of mouth, that endorsement, that referral, still your strongest source of best, best new patient source that you can get, they already come in knowing what you did for somebody else, and they want that right and so it’s not a matter of you having to say, Okay, so let’s go through this and let’s find out.

Regan 20:43
Where my passion comes from definitely is on the clinical side for communicating the value out because I’m privately texting chat during our interview right now, I’m telling everybody listening and I’m like, CTFs, for for kids, can I give this to kids? I am a carry free customer, I use the AB rinse. So he’s like, yes and I was like, Oh, my gosh, I’ve got it. Because I have worked so hard with my own children to explain to them. If you’re doing your brushing habits, if you’re if you’re practicing good hygiene, and you still get a cavity, there’s other factors that are at play. So don’t feel bad about it. Let’s just talk about it with your dentist, and we’ll figure out what kind of underlying

Dr. Kim Kutsch
issue maybe probably wouldn’t give it to some child under the age of six.

Regan
Well, my kids are older than that.

Dr. Kim Kutsch
Yeah, no, I know but I mean, if we were recommending it, you know, I probably wouldn’t give it to some kid younger than six but certainly, in that mix intuition stage, there’s no reason they can’t use it. Right. I mean, absolutely. Yeah, it’s interesting. I, you know, just getting back to like, there may be something else going on 70% of all Americans take at least one prescription medication per day and this is all aged demographics down to age six months and, you know, we’ve diagnosed like, 48% of our infants have GERD today, first, now, we can’t, they can’t even get, you know, baby formula.

So I don’t know what they’re giving these kids. Instead, but, you know, the dry mouth situation is, you know, in this because of the medications that people are taking, even I mean, on young children, and then all the psychotropic drugs, these we’ve got our children on it just we got 17 million kid adolescents under the age of 17, on taking psychotropic drugs, and for already, you know, already HD and our ADHD, I’m sorry, and, and anxiety and depression, and you know, and we got the bullying going on in the internet, you got all this stuff going on and it’s like, what I just I’ve got grandkids, you know, what a confusing time to be a kid used to worry about playing baseball after school and now it’s like, you got to use the right pronouns, and you got to do this, or you got to do that and it’s like, Jesus, where does it stop? And then you go home, and you get on the internet and people are, you know, I don’t know, it’s just, there’s a, and then you got all the drugs, you know, in the environment.

He had all his fentanyl coming into the country, such and then we’re putting these kids on these drugs. Right, you know, so I just, I worry. I mean, I guess that’s all I can say but it’s, you know when I started this carry-free movement with Doug, back in 2000 and I have to laugh at myself because I told John Featherstone at the time. I said, John, give me 10 years, and we’ll knock the bastard off. I mean, to quote Sir Edmund Hillary, be, he was a kiwi, obviously and so as John Featherstone, I said, John, just give me 10 years, and we’ll knock the bastard off and we’ll Okay, that was 12 years ago, and we’re losing the battle.

Like, there’s Morty K today than there was 10 years ago, right and we’ve figured out how to work through and have success but the bigger you know, so I’m winning my battle on my Battlefield, in my practice, but the war itself that we’re losing, right, and so, you know, there’s more decay, there are more people on medications, we’re eating more sugar, although actually, the sugar consumption in the United States has gone down slightly, finally, but when you look at that, it’s, I don’t know how to fix that. You know, I mean, I literally I don’t know how to fix

Regan
education it has, it’s because it’s so it has to be holistic in the way that you live your life. It has to be educational, I mean, down to the food that our schools are serving to how we think about health care, I think it gets into a much larger conversation, which is health care.

Dr. Kim Kutsch
That’s all I mean, the diet, nutrition and all of that and you’ve got people like Rob Lustig, bless his heart out there championing championing, you know, the, you know, against sugar, you know, trying to improve the American diet. Because you look at all of the other systemic Associated Diseases, you know, heart disease, you know, obesity Um, hypertension, cancer, I mean you go down the list of all these other you know, Associated Diseases from that nutrition aside from just getting habit cavities in your teeth.

I was gonna share with you Reagan so I have you know Invisalign and right at the moment, I was an extraction ortho case I, I was born with a deviated septum and I couldn’t breathe through my nose. This is in the 50s, right, which they didn’t fix, you know, in those days and I couldn’t nurse because it took me if you can’t breathe through your nose, it takes you a long time to eat. Right? So yeah, my mom could nursery but it took me like three hours, like to nurse and you know, she didn’t have that kind of time.

So put me on formula and a bottle and the nipples on the bottles in the 50s look like a thumb. Right and so literally, I was already had a constructed palette because I wasn’t squeezing my tongue against the natural nipple and broadening my palate. So I ended up with this, you know, constricted palate. Then in my first round of ortho, of course, they did extraction orthodontics made it even smaller yet, I had anterior constriction. You know, in my occlusion, still couldn’t breathe through my nose. So I’ve been a mouth breather my entire life and I finally just thought, and one of the things that we know about mouth breathing is, we know it well.

Now, the associated systemic effects of that is that it increases your blood pressure and I’ve watched my blood pressure just slowly increase over my life to the point where like two years ago, I just start taking medication for it and I don’t like taking medication for anything, right? So I’m like, Okay, let’s see what’s causing this, and let’s fix that and so I’m opening spaces, I’m going to have my pre molars put back with implants. I’m about not quite two years into this process, but I’m root for my tongue. I just had the nasal surgery about two months ago, I can breathe through my nose, that is so awesome and I gotta tell you, it’s life changing, right? But it’s me, you know, in my 60s, correcting, you know, the health care, you know, but a lifetime of stuff but you know, my blood pressure is going down, as I’m breathing through my nose, and I have to get off the medication completely.

Regan
the emotional part for me and one of the reasons that I that I admire your work so much, and the work of Dr. Bradley Bayless as well is, is one, it’s the message of it’s never, it’s never too late, much like your patient in her 80s That decided to go ahead with the bridge. I had a really personal experience. So Dr. Kim coach for all our listeners came and spoke at a PTA event in Cancun, Mexico a few years ago, my first time ever hearing Dr. Coach, and when he started going into when you started going into the risk factors, it started to change my perception, I started to see things differently and then Bradley bill with the heart attack gene book got up,

I just sat there and I had one of those moments like this is going to change someone’s life and I went outside of the room and I called someone extremely personally close to me and who had been struggling and felt like he was older, you know, he’d had a good life and his health wasn’t where it should be. He doesn’t like taking medication and he’s, he’s fine with it like being in the end and I was. So I got on the phone and I said you can change this, you need to go to the doctor, but you can change you can actually reverse it. It’s not just a living a flatline right now going forward, you can actually make it better and if it did, it changed his life and he found out all sorts of things that he wouldn’t have been I don’t think he would be here today had he not made that that change and so that’s why I’m personally so passionate and if, of course, you would end up in that situation in your 60s saying, Well, I guess I’m gonna fix it now but that’s great.

Dr. Kim Kutsch
Because, you know, I thought it was really when I retired from clinical practice that I was like, You know what, I want me fix now take care of myself. I took care of everybody else all these years, and I didn’t have time to do this and I’m gonna live another 30 years and I want to I don’t want to have to live this way for another 30 years. Right and so I can tell you the treatment wasn’t necessarily fun, all of it. The nasal surgery was breathtaking but I can breathe through my nose. I mean, that’s just been a life changing experience for me. It’s been really interesting. Welcome to breathing. Oh, it is it’s amazing to me, and I can smell things that I’ve never been able to smell. I don’t know it’s just crazy but so it’s never too late. Right? I don’t have I’m sorry.

I waited if I have any regrets. I regret that I waited this long to get this corrected. So but it’s going well and like I say I’m two years into it, but I had lost it to from a sports involved accident years ago. Go and so I had an implant, you know, for tooth number 25. Well, you know, implants don’t move with ortho, so I had to have that taken out. So now I am without tooth number 25, although I have a, you know, a denture tooth in my, in my Invisalign tray, but you know, I can’t eat with this and so I’ve taken it out and so I will be talking to somebody who forget that I don’t have a tooth there and like people are like, No, and when it first was, like, the first year, I mean, I was like, I was embarrassed like to like, take it out and eat has anybody seen me without a front tooth? And, and then I thought, and I can’t tell you I can’t begin to tell you how crippling it is just to be missing one of the smallest teeth in the entire mouth. Just one and two things for me that were a revelation number one is, how embarrassing and how much.

I think shame there’s associated with that and number two, how debilitating it is. Like, I couldn’t bite through Santa. I still can’t if I have it. I can’t bite to a sandwich. I couldn’t eat corn on the cob. I went I couldn’t eat ribs. If there were things I just went down and it’s like, I went to the restaurant. I was like, you know, I’m used to ordering whatever I felt like that day and it’s like, Okay, I gotta be able to order what I can chew, right and I had sown, and I thought to myself, God, I had all these patients all these years that were missing 1012 1520 teeth. How did they possibly get by? Right? How did they do that? I’m missing that one of this and it’s the smallest tooth in the mouth and it’s crippled me and it’s been those two experiences have been very humbling for me. You know. So it’s been it’s been so but like I say only regrets into this a long time ago.

Regan
I think that was one of the first marketing campaigns I ever did 11 years ago for a PDA doctor it was a huge billboard, and it said, How would you like to bite into a fresh year of corn again?

Dr. Kim Kutsch
Oh, yeah, right. Or bite? I can’t bite into an apple right now. Right? Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. So that anyway, so I mean, I’m in the process of getting there and it’s one of these days, I wouldn’t be able to smile without Invisalign trays and I will I look, I’m looking forward to that day, actually but yeah, so that’s kind of that’s kind of, you know, quite a bit about my history and dental caries and my interests and how this all came about.

Regan
Thank you for taking time out of your out of your schedule, and taking time to educate everyone, we’re gonna spread this podcast as far and wide as possible we can because it’s such great information, and thank you, thank you for all that you’ve done and all you continue to do.

Dr. Chad Johnson
Yeah, it’s cool to be able to personally thank you, I’ve not met you, you know, other than through your book and stuff like that, which allows for you to be immortal, you know, to be able to spread, you know, that information beyond your, your speaking events, or personally, you know, telling someone about it. So, it’s really cool. I want you to even know, I have a patient, we went fee for service a couple years ago, family decided to leave the practice, they still come in and buy the CT X rents.

They don’t even come here anymore but so they don’t value me that much but they value my decision to sell CT X rents. So they, their family, they would come in every time how many cavities? It wasn’t, do they have cavities, how many cavities? And that’s kind of uncommon for my area, I don’t live in an area where it’s just like, it’s just rampant and all that, you know, so I live, I guess, socioeconomically in an area in Des Moines, Iowa, where, you know, we don’t have that and but they were and as soon as they started the rinse, it stopped and so they value it, and they it’s gold to them.

So on behalf of them, thank you and for me, too. It’s been empowering to let patients know, you know, you can do something proactively, and how cool is that to be able to talk risk factors, the way that Bruce talks about it the way that you know that COys talks about it, and to be able to share those ways those modalities for people to choose health.

Dr. Kim Kutsch
So thank you. Yeah, well, Chad, and thank both of you, Chad Reagan for those kind comments. It’s funny, I just read two articles in the last couple of weeks in the Wall Street Journal, and one was about that your most productive years are your 60s and your second most productive years or your 70s and it’s, I found that quite interesting and then I’m working with another wellness coach, and she’s kind of focused on trying to help people transition into the retirement mindset and the greatest challenge for people when they retire, is finding a purpose in life is not fun. It’s not all the things that you would think it would be.

It’s not It’s finding purpose and I will tell you that right now I feel like I, you know, giving up clinical practice was kind of hard for me to do because I served for two years, and I saw myself as a dentist, you know, first and foremost, but I really I’m so I’m not a retired because I’m actually actually more involved now, you know, on a day to day basis with Kerry Freeman and I’ve had more fun than I’ve ever had in my life but I feel like I’m doing my best work right now and fulfilling a purpose to help as many people who are suffering from this disease as to help as many people as possible and it’s opening up opportunities, even for doors are opening for me to help like cancer patients and people that I, you know, had never thought I’d be able to reach and touch and help so, so thank you.

It’s been I like I say, I’m living my best life. I’m having so much fun and it’s it’s so personally rewarding just to know that you’re helping people. That’s right. Well, thanks for doing that. Yeah, Jen Regan and thank you guys for having me on today I don’t know if we talked about all the things that you want to talk about or not, but I enjoyed it. And

Dr. Chad Johnson
I sometimes when I’m hungry, I go in expecting to want to eat four appetizers, and three desserts and everything like that but when you get done with a meal and you realize you’re satisfied, you need to stop. So thank you. Yes, I could keep you, hostage, for talking a lot of nerdy stuff but I’m going to say you know what, you’ve had two desserts and three appetizers already. You’re full. I’m cool.

Regan
I’ve seen you eat three desserts. I do. In fact,

Dr. Chad Johnson
those numbers aren’t arbitrary.

Dr. Kim Kutsch
And to get bigger, it’s a great thing are using the wrench. Yeah, that’s

Dr. Chad Johnson
pretty much as amazing. I’m not 400 pounds, but whatever. So.

Dr. Kim Kutsch
So let’s see, I’d love to come back sometime to in the future. So I’ve got a couple of other new projects I’m working on when the time comes to help other people. I’d love to come back and spend more time with you guys. Thank you so much for your podcasts because getting all this kind of information out like this is the this is the missing link is we have all this knowledge we have to share it with people. Yes.

Regan
Well thank you Dr. Koop so much and people if they if you want to check out K free exists just carry free.com Right. Yep. K free.com and we will have Kerry free at the productivity workshop is coming September. So carry through will be there and speaking during our advanced clinical hygiene breakout session. So that’s another great opportunity. Cool. Well, thank you.

Dr. Kim Kutsch
Everybody, live your best life.

Regan
Thank you for listening to another episode of the Everyday Practices Podcast. Chad and I are here every week. Thanks to our community of listeners just like you and we’d love your help. It would mean the world if you can help spread the word by sharing this episode with a fellow dentist and leave us a review on iTunes or Spotify. Do you have an extraordinary story you’d like to share? Or feedback on how we can make this podcast even more awesome. Drop us an email at podcast@productivedentist.com And don’t forget to check out our other podcasts from Productive Dentist Academy at productivedentist.com/podcasts See you next week.