Built Around the Mouth, Not the Tooth (E.171)

“I always say I’ll find a way or make a way.” – Dr. Katie Lee

Brief Overview of the Episode

Dr. Katie Lee’s philosophy of care was shaped long before she opened Collective Health Society.

After a severe ATV accident in high school led to years of reconstructive surgery, broken teeth, oral infection, systemic inflammation, and serious health complications, she learned firsthand that the mouth is not separate from the body.

That experience eventually pushed her beyond traditional dentistry.

Today, Dr. Lee leads a 15,000 square foot integrated medical-dental facility in Centennial, Colorado where dental care, airway treatment, biological dentistry, IV therapy, wellness providers, and education all work together under one roof.

This conversation is about more than a practice model. It is about what becomes possible when your philosophy of care drives your business design.

What This Episode Reveals

A practice becomes unrestricted when the doctor stops building around reimbursement and starts building around belief.

Dr. Lee shares how Collective Health Society was designed to solve the gaps patients fall through when dentistry and medicine stay disconnected.

She explains why early intervention matters, why saliva and microbiome testing change the conversation, and why waiting for visible damage is not the same as being conservative.

Victoria and Dr. Lee also explore how airway, hormones, inflammation, periodontal risk, and systemic health are forcing dentistry into a larger leadership role.

What You’ll Learn

• Why Dr. Lee believes dentists may become the new primary care leaders
• How oral bacteria and inflammation can affect systemic health before major dental destruction appears
• Why biological dentistry requires a different mindset than mechanical dentistry
• How airway issues can show up in perimenopausal and postmenopausal women
• Why Dr. Lee built Collective Health Society with dental, medical, wellness, airway, and education spaces under one roof
• How storytelling, SEO, and provider relationships replaced generic marketing in her growth strategy
• Why team alignment matters when a doctor’s philosophy of care goes beyond the traditional model

If This Sounds Familiar

You know there is more to dentistry than fixing teeth.
You see patterns in your patients that do not fit inside a six-month cleaning model.
You want to diagnose earlier, treat more comprehensively, and build a practice where your team understands the why behind the care.

And you may be asking the harder question:

What would my practice look like if I stopped designing it around limitations?

Next Steps

Dr. Katie Lee will be the keynote speaker at Unrestricted in Centennial, Colorado on September 10th and 11th.

Attendees will tour Collective Health Society and see firsthand how philosophy of care, clinical systems, team alignment, and business model design come together in one integrated facility.

If you are ready to rethink what your practice can become, this episode is a powerful place to start.

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Patients do not always doubt the dentistry. They doubt what they cannot feel yet.

At Unrestricted, you will step back, look at the quality of your revenue, and build a more intentional path forward for your practice. Because when your diagnosis, communication, and team alignment are clear, patients can make confident decisions before pain becomes the reason they finally say yes.

Learn more and reserve your spot: Attend Here

 

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00:02 – 00:00:17:00
Victoria Peterson
Have you ever had that moment where you thought, my vision is bigger than my current circumstances? If you have, you are absolutely going to enjoy this podcast with my very good friend, Doctor Katie Lee of Centennial, Colorado. Welcome, doctor Lee.

00:00:17:01 – 00:00:20:18
Dr. Katie Lee
Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

00:00:20:20 – 00:00:48:18
Victoria Peterson
You know, it has been a pleasure getting to know you. I want to say maybe it’s been two years now, maybe a little bit long. I first met you when you had a dream of building a building. Now bolding is complete and you’re filling it, and your vision is so big. And I want to talk about that, because one of the things we say about building an investment grade practice is that at the center of it all is the philosophy of care.

00:00:48:20 – 00:01:23:06
Victoria Peterson
How how will we treat our patients? How? And that becomes a reflection of self care for the provider, because it becomes really hard to give what you don’t live. And so I want to talk about that. I want to talk about your philosophy of care, how that drives your own personal lifestyle and how that impacts your patients. So let’s pick up your storyline with Once Upon a Time, there was a highly successful dentist who had a great career as a senior level associate in a large organization.

00:01:23:06 – 00:01:27:19
Victoria Peterson
And your vision called and you stepped into it.

00:01:28:00 – 00:01:55:09
Dr. Katie Lee
Yeah, I threw everything away and left. People thought I was crazy. You know, it really started back when I was in high school and I got into an ATV accident, and so I went head first into a telephone pole and broke everything in my face from my eyebrows down, was in a coma for several days. And then it took four years and nine reconstructive surgeries to kind of put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

00:01:55:11 – 00:02:20:09
Dr. Katie Lee
And through that time, because I couldn’t open my mouth, all my teeth were broken. I had lost a bunch of teeth, but I couldn’t brush them. I couldn’t get them cared for. And so I really had this systemic inflammation and infection that started happening. And so I lost a bunch of weight, dropped down to under 100 pounds, became very malnourished because I couldn’t eat, liver enzymes spiked and my kidneys started shutting down.

00:02:20:09 – 00:02:39:24
Dr. Katie Lee
So I learned at a young age just how important the mouth was to overall health. And so that really drove me into dentistry. But then I went to the same school that every other dentist goes through, right? And so we’re really just taught to, you know, clean teeth and be kind of tooth mechanics. And so I got out of school and I did really well doing that.

00:02:39:24 – 00:03:02:02
Dr. Katie Lee
As you mentioned, I had a great career. But what I kept finding, the more and more that I was caring for patients was that the patients who were the sickest dental in my practice were also the sickest systemically. And I grew incredibly frustrated because I was very limited in the types of results that I could get for those patients, or I’d feel like I would fix them.

00:03:02:02 – 00:03:20:19
Dr. Katie Lee
And then they come back 3 to 6 months later and be at the same spot that they were before. And so I didn’t feel like I was positively impacting anyone’s health or as much as I wanted to. And then when I was trying to bring in other clinicians outside of the dental office to help me, those patients couldn’t get access to those clinicians.

00:03:20:19 – 00:03:41:23
Dr. Katie Lee
The waitlist was too long, and they would go and that clinician would say, you know, your dentist is crazy. The mouth doesn’t have anything to do with this. And so I just grew really frustrated and, you know, started thinking, there has to be a better way to get people healthy. And so, yeah, I threw it all away and then dreamt up this big clinic that I’m sitting in now.

00:03:42:00 – 00:03:50:09
Victoria Peterson
All right. So tell us the name of your your I can’t even call it a clinic, your medical facility, your your.

00:03:50:11 – 00:04:20:01
Dr. Katie Lee
So it’s called the Collective Health Society. And so I really wanted a name that embodied what I was trying to practice. So we’re a health collective. So we are collection of different providers that all come together. We have traditional providers, nontraditional providers, wellness people, and we all really work together to comprehensively treat our patients. I wanted to call it health instead of dentistry, because it’s much bigger than just the mouth, and the mouth is an integral part to our overall health.

00:04:20:01 – 00:04:38:08
Dr. Katie Lee
And then I really loved the word society because I felt like it brought a little bit of, not boutique ness. You’re good with words, but, you know, kind of not an exclusive group. But you know what I’m trying to say? Like a. Yeah, like a cohort or a group.

00:04:38:12 – 00:04:46:05
Victoria Peterson
I was going to say, when you say society, I picture like a well-mannered group of people, you know, and like.

00:04:46:07 – 00:04:49:17
Dr. Katie Lee
One of those social clubs, right? Like you belong to the social club.

00:04:49:17 – 00:04:50:19
Speaker 3
You all.

00:04:50:21 – 00:04:57:20
Dr. Katie Lee
Want to run in the same circle. You have the same lifestyle, you believe the same thing. So that’s kind of where I came up with Collective Health Society.

00:04:58:00 – 00:05:18:09
Victoria Peterson
I love that so much. And if you are joining us in September for our program unrestricted, you are going to get to meet doctor Lee. She’s going to be our kickoff keynote speaker talking about her story. And we get to tour her beautiful 15,000 square foot building with, I don’t know how many chandeliers that you have, but it is.

00:05:18:10 – 00:05:19:09
Victoria Peterson
Absolutely.

00:05:19:11 – 00:05:20:21
Dr. Katie Lee
There’s never enough chandeliers.

00:05:20:22 – 00:05:35:20
Victoria Peterson
There’s enough, there’s enough. So I didn’t know your story about the ATV and your four years of surgery. Wow, that’s a lot. Now, do you still have impact from that time in your life today?

00:05:35:21 – 00:05:58:12
Dr. Katie Lee
Do you? Oh, definitely. Yeah. So, you know, I my teeth were in very poor shape because the dentist couldn’t even get in to fix them. So I have implants, I have root canals, I have crowns, fillings, you know, and as we know, in dentistry, things don’t last forever. And so I’m constantly having to change things out and improve things.

00:05:58:12 – 00:06:20:22
Dr. Katie Lee
And I also have a lot of health implications from what’s happened, but also just from practicing years of dentistry and not really paying attention to my own health. And so just kind of putting all the pieces together and you got to live what you preach. Right. And so that’s really taking me down this more integrated, you know, biological, comprehensive approach to oral health care.

00:06:20:24 – 00:06:26:10
Victoria Peterson
That’s amazing. What are some of the things that you do preventative for your own oral health?

00:06:26:15 – 00:06:50:21
Dr. Katie Lee
Oh my gosh. So I love this company is called Daily Dental Cares. She makes a couple of different mints. One is called faucet which is a mint that’s clinically proven to stop tooth decay. Wow. And prevent it. And then she also makes something called protection, which kills gram negative anaerobes for periodontal bacteria. But it’s also a prebiotic for the good bacteria in the mouth.

00:06:50:21 – 00:07:01:14
Dr. Katie Lee
So I’m constantly using the men’s. And then the other big thing that I do that’s preventative is mouth taping. So I’m a really big mouth tape.

00:07:01:16 – 00:07:23:20
Victoria Peterson
A method, you know, I sort of mouth taping. And that’s when I realized that I had, sleep apnea. I had I had silent sleep apnea because as you go through menopause, you lose collagen and, you know, your skin gets a little looser, right? It’s not as tight. I didn’t think about that happening to the cartilage in my nose and into my esophagus.

00:07:23:20 – 00:07:38:20
Victoria Peterson
And so I would literally just get so plugged up in my sinuses I couldn’t breathe. And though. So now I’ve got a little ripple device I put in my nose or a breathe right strip if I’m traveling. And now open up the nose. Close the mouth.

00:07:38:22 – 00:08:05:11
Dr. Katie Lee
Yeah. So we treat a ton of airway at our clinic. It’s one of my key pillars to health. And my number one patient that we treat are perimenopausal and postmenopausal women because we lose our collagen. But then estrogens also responsible for our muscle tone. So as we go through the hormonal transition and our hormones drop, our muscles, you know, no longer have that strong tone that they did, and then the airways collapse and petite women are actually at higher risk.

00:08:05:11 – 00:08:23:11
Dr. Katie Lee
We always think airway is associated with obese men. That’s not the case because if you’re a petite woman, you’re born with a small airway to begin with. And we measure that on all patients that come in to see if they’re at high risk for airway. And we can actually reverse sleep apnea and snoring and upper airway resistance syndrome with our laser in our office.

00:08:23:11 – 00:08:27:15
Dr. Katie Lee
So we do that. We get people breathing through their nose and then we mouth tape.

00:08:27:17 – 00:08:30:24
Victoria Peterson
Okay, I’m coming in early for our conference in September.

00:08:31:05 – 00:08:32:19
Speaker 3
Yes, we’ll get to treat it.

00:08:32:19 – 00:09:05:08
Victoria Peterson
I would love that because it really is it is an issue and we don’t think about that. So you’re giving us so many examples of how philosophy of care impacts your business design. So you could have easily compromised your dream, compromised your vision, compromised like I think it’s in your bones. I think it’s in your DNA, your passion for wellness and helping people through the struggles of the medical system.

00:09:05:08 – 00:09:23:10
Victoria Peterson
So I don’t I really don’t think there was ever any stopping you. But how did that inform when you built your own practice? Like how did it inform the size of the building? What type of employees you would hire, what type of equipment you were going to put in there? Talk to us about that.

00:09:23:11 – 00:09:27:10
Speaker 3
Yeah. So the size of the building is.

00:09:27:15 – 00:09:28:12
Dr. Katie Lee
Was based off.

00:09:28:12 – 00:09:28:18
Speaker 3
Of the.

00:09:28:18 – 00:09:49:20
Dr. Katie Lee
Fact that I love training and education. So I really thought, you know, because when I, when I left my previous role, I wasn’t sure I was going to practice anymore. I had a great first career, so I didn’t really need to continue practicing. But, you know, I thought if I’m going to do this again, like, I really want to build something that I just yearn to go to every day.

00:09:49:20 – 00:10:16:04
Dr. Katie Lee
And the big thing for me is training in education. I love sharing everything that I have learned. I am an open book. I don’t keep anything for myself. I always think the better I can make other clinicians, the better patients can get treated and the more I can learn from other people. And so I just really have this kind of abundance mentality of there’s so much knowledge and there’s so many patients that there is no scarcity in my mind.

00:10:16:06 – 00:10:45:13
Dr. Katie Lee
So I needed a facility that had enough room for a training and education center. And then I also wanted enough room for a fully integrated medical dental practice. And then I also wanted an airway clinic space. And so there’s not very many buildings that will house all of those things in one location. And one location was critically important to me because as soon as the patient leaves your practice, the chances of them actually going to that referral are very small.

00:10:45:16 – 00:10:58:12
Dr. Katie Lee
You probably know what that number is, but it’s less than 20% I think. So I needed it everything in one location. And so that’s how the 15,000 square foot building came about, because it could hold all of that.

00:10:58:18 – 00:10:59:15
Victoria Peterson
It’s massive.

00:10:59:16 – 00:11:00:03
Speaker 3
It’s so.

00:11:00:03 – 00:11:03:22
Victoria Peterson
Fun to drive up into the parking lot and it’s just it’s there.

00:11:04:01 – 00:11:05:02
Speaker 3
I have room to build.

00:11:05:02 – 00:11:31:20
Dr. Katie Lee
Out more spaces to. It’s not completely built out yet, so I’m excited about what I can do there. And then in terms of the equipment that I chose, you know, it was really about trying to bring in things that were as nontoxic as possible because dentistry is a horrendously toxic field, and it’s unfortunately, the clinicians and the team members that get the biggest burden of the toxic load.

00:11:31:20 – 00:11:55:21
Dr. Katie Lee
And so I wanted to create an environment that I could survive in and thrive for the rest of my life. But then also technologies that made the experience of going to the dentist as enjoyable for patients as possible, but that also would get them healthy. So we have ozone gas, we have ozone water. I use dual wavelength lasers.

00:11:55:23 – 00:11:59:15
Dr. Katie Lee
So we have a lot of those technologies in the office.

00:11:59:17 – 00:12:05:16
Victoria Peterson
What are some of the other things that you do to keep the environment cleaner for your employees?

00:12:05:20 – 00:12:33:00
Dr. Katie Lee
So we invest heavily in air filtration systems. We have very nontoxic paints. We do a lot of extra oral sections for when we’re doing procedures on patients so that we’re not inhaling this. All of the debris, we have ventilators that we can breathe through ozone machines. Anytime one of us, you know, feels like we’re getting sick, or we might have been exposed to a patient who has a sinus infection.

00:12:33:00 – 00:12:46:02
Dr. Katie Lee
You’ll see one of us sitting on an ozone sheen breathing in some ozone gas. So yeah, those are just some of the few things that we do. I’ve therapy. I’m always talking to you about IVs. We do a lot of IV therapy here, too.

00:12:46:04 – 00:12:50:04
Victoria Peterson
You really fill up your Walmart shopping cart, didn’t you?

00:12:50:06 – 00:12:55:06
Speaker 3
Walmart, Amazon distributors. What do you say? You don’t buy this stuff?

00:12:55:07 – 00:12:59:06
Victoria Peterson
You don’t buy this stuff at Walmart.

00:12:59:08 – 00:13:24:12
Victoria Peterson
Oh my goodness. And you know, I know if you’re listening, you can hear it in her voice. But if you’re on YouTube and you can see this doctor Katie, you absolutely glow when you talk about how well you take care of yourself and how well you take care of your team. And that’s one of my premises, is that, you know, most, most dentist entrepreneurs, they want to be an owner.

00:13:24:13 – 00:13:49:23
Victoria Peterson
This is my practice. I control everything that’s in it. And and that is what it is. And all the decisions route through them. Nothing can happen without them. And our health suffers, you know. And so you’ve taken the route of, I’m going to put my, my philosophy of care and some governance and some, you know, standard operating procedures in the center.

00:13:50:04 – 00:14:03:20
Victoria Peterson
So my team knows what my standard is. They know before I walk in the room that these are the expectations. And you’re not going to come to me with silly questions like, should we take x rays? Or I didn’t know if you wanted a period chart today.

00:14:03:23 – 00:14:04:09
Speaker 3
Yeah.

00:14:04:10 – 00:14:04:19
Dr. Katie Lee
Oh yeah.

00:14:04:19 – 00:14:06:02
Speaker 3
There’s none of those. No.

00:14:06:07 – 00:14:08:08
Victoria Peterson
Imagine that happening in your practice.

00:14:08:09 – 00:14:11:07
Speaker 3
No, not at all.

00:14:11:09 – 00:14:23:15
Victoria Peterson
And so that’s, that’s how it kind of filters through. How does it filter through to your marketing? Do you just get some generic postcard and plop them in newcomer mailboxes? Like what do you do.

00:14:23:16 – 00:14:24:11
Speaker 3
Yeah. So.

00:14:24:15 – 00:14:47:08
Dr. Katie Lee
You know, I’ve shared with you kind of our marketing journey over time and it’s it’s, you know, being an entrepreneur and having your own office and going from not having to do marketing yourself to then taking it on, it’s a really big lift. And what I’ve come to understand is that with the practice, this bespoke right, no one’s doing what we’re doing and it’s complicated.

00:14:47:08 – 00:15:17:10
Dr. Katie Lee
And the fact that we have all these different providers under one roof, so no one looks to go see a dentist and then says, oh, I’m also going to go see her natural path for women’s health. Right. Those two things initially, first thought don’t necessarily go together, but they really do. And so we spend a ton of time building out our SEO and making sure that there’s ample content on our website so that patients can really understand what we’re trying to do here before they even come in and see us.

00:15:17:10 – 00:15:46:10
Dr. Katie Lee
So we’ve moved more from doing PPC clickable ads, postcards to let’s tell the story of what C.H. is and the type of patients that come here and what’s actually worked the best for me in terms of getting new patients is I spend a ton of time all day, every day on Wednesday, meeting with other health and wellness providers in Colorado from all the way from up north to south of Colorado Springs.

00:15:46:10 – 00:16:12:14
Dr. Katie Lee
And I invite them to my office and I show them what we’re doing. I show them the health providers we have, the services we do, and then we find a way that we can collaborate to help serve their patients. And so a lot of our referrals, we get a ton of referrals from existing patients. But then most of the people who come to us are from other medical providers, which I love because those patients are coming in because they know that they have a problem and we can help them with their problem.

00:16:12:16 – 00:16:37:21
Victoria Peterson
I love that because that’s been the biggest hold up in the oral systemic work is dentists and hygienists get educated on it. But then getting even like ear, nose and throat doctors to take you seriously when you send a bell scope finding over to them and they’re like, no, I don’t think that’s cancer, let’s just watch it. Or pediatricians and you say, I don’t think they have ADHD.

00:16:37:22 – 00:17:00:02
Victoria Peterson
I think they have an airway issue. And, you know, just working with the various providers. I have a theory. You’re probably the person to answer this. I have a theory that dentistry oral physicians could identify maybe 80% of chronic health issues. If you’re attuned to what you can see.

00:17:00:04 – 00:17:10:11
Dr. Katie Lee
So you just gave me goosebumps. So I actually told the past president of the American Dental Association that I foresee dentists being the new primary care doctors.

00:17:10:17 – 00:17:11:14
Speaker 3
Nice.

00:17:11:16 – 00:17:29:00
Dr. Katie Lee
Because the mouth mirrors what happens in the body. And we can do saliva testing. There’s lots of things that we can do to find out what’s happening in the body. And then we can kind of coordinate care and refer out there. And that’s how things work. In my office, I would say 90% of patients come in through dental.

00:17:29:01 – 00:17:52:10
Dr. Katie Lee
And then based on what I see in my exam and my diagnostics that I take, I refer out to our providers within the collective. So it’s a really cool model, and it’s nice to creating that story for patients before they come in to know, so that they know what to expect, because we’re not getting those patients that are coming in saying, I’m just here for my six month cleaning and checkup, right.

00:17:52:11 – 00:18:01:02
Dr. Katie Lee
Patients are actually coming in asking for the services that we provide, and it’s a completely different way of practicing than what I was doing before.

00:18:01:04 – 00:18:32:00
Victoria Peterson
I can imagine I’m putting the finishing touches on my new book, Investment Grade Practices, and there is a chapter about philosophy of care, and it started out as a philosophy of care and communicate that to your team. And I thought, nobody knows what that means. So I did a little research and kind of looked anecdotally at the experiences I’ve had in consulting, and I’ve identified maybe seven levels within a general practice, and they don’t go linearly.

00:18:32:00 – 00:18:53:02
Victoria Peterson
But in general, you graduate dental school knowing how to do emergency care like I can. I can extract a basic extraction, I can do a basic root canal, I can do a composite, I can do a single crown. And it can take years for doctors to build up their confidence to do a crown and a composite that are next to each other.

00:18:53:05 – 00:19:19:21
Victoria Peterson
Right. So that’s that’s where you start is emergency care then general family care. So now I can do two teeth in a quadrant at a time, but I’m usually still within the confines of, of insurance plans and what the patient wants. And I’m like you said, you’re in that mechanic mode. And then along the way it bifurcates. Usually not first to oral systemic.

00:19:19:22 – 00:19:53:13
Victoria Peterson
You I think are rare because of your your preexisting life. But it in the past is bifurcated to cosmetics. I want to do veneers invisalign whitening elective botox maybe that root or surgical implants sinus lifts, half mouth full mouth rehab. And then you get into the combination of cosmetic functional, and that is still not necessarily comprehensive. So that’s that’s step 123.

00:19:53:13 – 00:20:15:10
Victoria Peterson
And then step four you get into comprehensive where you’re looking at risk factors and linking heart disease and periodontal disease and dementia and all of these menopause and sleep apnea. There’s comprehensive. And then there’s biological which is comprehensive with a twist.

00:20:15:12 – 00:20:16:20
Speaker 3
Whole new layer.

00:20:16:22 – 00:20:38:14
Victoria Peterson
Yeah. What do you think is the biggest distinction? Well let me ask this a different way. I was recently working with a client and they said, I don’t believe in this 30% period percentage, not like across the board. I don’t think every area of America has that demographic. And I said, well, okay, let’s throw the 30% out right now.

00:20:38:14 – 00:21:07:06
Victoria Peterson
You’re at 7%. Do you think that more than 7% have gum disease? And the response is really interesting. And I think it’s a function of our knowing catching up to what is available. So the response was, if I see a patient with one five millimeter pocket, scattered threes and fours and a little bit of bleeding, I’m not going to tell my hygienist to do scaling and route planning.

00:21:07:08 – 00:21:17:12
Victoria Peterson
What’s your take on that as a biological dentist? That’s a mechanical dentist answer. What’s your response? Is a biological dentist.

00:21:17:14 – 00:21:18:01
Speaker 3
Yeah.

00:21:18:01 – 00:21:21:23
Dr. Katie Lee
This is my hot button, so.

00:21:22:00 – 00:21:23:12
Victoria Peterson
I’m sorry. I did not know that was your.

00:21:23:12 – 00:21:24:21
Speaker 3
Hot button.

00:21:24:23 – 00:21:25:06
Victoria Peterson
This should.

00:21:25:07 – 00:21:26:18
Speaker 3
Be good. I’m trying to take a.

00:21:26:18 – 00:21:28:21
Dr. Katie Lee
Breath before I respond here.

00:21:28:23 – 00:21:29:07
Speaker 3
So.

00:21:29:08 – 00:21:58:09
Dr. Katie Lee
The problem with dentistry and medicine in general is we say we want to be conservative and preventative. Yet dentistry is a very reactive profession. We wait until we see disease or damage before we treat it. And that’s exactly what A15 millimeter pocket is. We have bone loss in that area. We have been watching three and fours this entire time without bone loss.

00:21:58:10 – 00:22:22:14
Dr. Katie Lee
Didn’t do anything about it. And now this patient has irreversible damage in their body. The other problem, big problem that I foresee. Well, let me back up. The other reason why I think we’ve been this way is because dentistry really has lacked testing, that we need to show that there’s actually something physiologic going on for the patient that’s not good for their health.

00:22:22:14 – 00:22:48:12
Dr. Katie Lee
And we now have those tests. So we quantify what is going on in the patient’s mouth and how it’s affecting their system and health. So we no longer can ignore that. Microbiome issues in the mouth cause systemic health issues. What we now know we’re taking this one step further is that the way that the bacteria in the mouth harm the rest of the body is regardless of bone loss?

00:22:48:12 – 00:23:06:02
Dr. Katie Lee
So now I’m not even worried about the five millimeter pocket anymore. I know that the body, or that the bacteria in the mouth are disseminating into the bloodstream and going throughout the body. Whether or not that patient has carried on disease, they could have gingivitis and the damage is still there. So, yes, I don’t want my patients to get paid on disease.

00:23:06:03 – 00:23:23:23
Dr. Katie Lee
And yes, I want to treat them if they have it. But I need to be treating here, not here. Right. Like that’s way too late. The cancer spread, right patients in stage four. By that point I’m trying to get to like stage zero. We need to start treating here. So the for the docs that are like I see five millimeters.

00:23:23:23 – 00:23:28:06
Dr. Katie Lee
It’s in 1 or 2 areas. The rest are three and four. Not going to do anything about it.

00:23:28:08 – 00:23:32:24
Victoria Peterson
Well no no no. They said they’re not going to they’re not going to treatment plan scaling and root planning.

00:23:33:00 – 00:24:04:00
Dr. Katie Lee
I mean but that’s that’s so far behind because not only have we had irreversible damage in the mouth, but we know that this entire time that this has been happening, which this doesn’t happen overnight, it’s now irreversibly harmed the patient. Systemic health. We know that that’s science. It’s well documented. And so, you know, dentists really need to change their mindset between are we being conservative and preventative or are we going to intervene early and practice more holistic health?

00:24:04:02 – 00:24:40:19
Victoria Peterson
Yeah. My good friend Chris Duvall puts it this way. She says that the legal standard of care and the scientific standard of care between those two, there is a really big gap. Yeah. And and I think, oh my goodness, it’s so complex. It’s really easy to say if you see this, do that or that, but now you’ve got the mindset of the hygienist and you’ve got multiple hygienists and they were all trained in different places, and you’ve got the mindset of associates who came out of a high volume quantity insurance reimbursable, just yes or no.

00:24:40:20 – 00:25:03:20
Victoria Peterson
Move. Yes or no? Move on. Yes or no? Move on. Right. That’s a lot of mindset. Set shift to go through to have this level of thinking. So I have a lot of compassion. So if you’re a doctor and you’re here know that I don’t think Doctor Katie and neither one are saying you’re doing anything unethical. However once you once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

00:25:03:21 – 00:25:21:23
Victoria Peterson
And I think, gosh, saliva tests have been around for way more than a decade now, but they’re still not common. I, I would think less than, what, 2% of offices now. I’ll be generous five, maybe 10% of offices do salivary testing.

00:25:22:01 – 00:25:39:23
Dr. Katie Lee
Yeah. And I would say that is really what I shifted a lot of mindsets. I didn’t always practice this way. Right. Like if someone came in with fours and bleeding, I’d say floss, for which we know no one’s going to do some back in six months, and we’ll recheck. But once you start testing, which this has been in the medical field since the beginning, right.

00:25:39:24 – 00:26:02:24
Dr. Katie Lee
Once you start seeing the results on a piece of paper, what’s there? Now, you don’t even have to really make the judgment call anymore because the data is in front of you. And then, you know, you brought up standard of care, which I always find an interesting conversation because standard of care, if you think about it, really is the bare minimum that needs to be done to not get in trouble, right?

00:26:03:00 – 00:26:25:02
Dr. Katie Lee
Like we all agree that like at least do this and you’ll be okay. I think every dentist, if you ask them, would always say that they strive to do beyond the standard of care, right? The best care possible. And so we need to get some alignment between what we say we want to do and what we actually practice in the office every day.

00:26:25:04 – 00:26:54:21
Victoria Peterson
What do you think shifted internally for you? Like you’re I’m clear that your mindset was always holistic because of your experience, but something clicked where you said, I’m going to build this and I’m going to have to attract people who have the same mindset and or train them to the level that this is not something I, I should do, but it is the way of life.

00:26:54:21 – 00:27:05:05
Victoria Peterson
How did you get that baked into your systems and in your teeth? Because I think that’s where doctors struggle. It’s like I’m all on board with this, but how do I get my team on board with this?

00:27:05:07 – 00:27:32:01
Dr. Katie Lee
Yeah, I mean, I had a couple life experiences that happened that made me go more biologic. One was a personal journey that I had. So I, you know, it took me six years to have my son multiple losses and six rounds of IVF with the best reproductive endocrinologist in the country, and they had no explanation as to why I couldn’t carry a.

00:27:32:01 – 00:27:52:23
Dr. Katie Lee
You played embryo and I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to figure it out, and they had no answers. And for me it’s like, well, there has to be an answer, right? You can’t just have repeated failures, and not have a reason why we’re put on this planet to reproduce. Right? So if I’m not doing that, something is off.

00:27:52:23 – 00:28:22:03
Dr. Katie Lee
And so I started digging more down health and wellness path to fertility. And that got me really interested. And there’s a really big component to fatality with oral health, with oral bacteria, root canal infections and airway. So that’s how it tied immediately back to dentistry. And so I got really passionate during my time off before I built the clinic, I actually specialized in microbiome testing for fertility patients around the country that were working with fertility providers.

00:28:22:05 – 00:28:43:22
Dr. Katie Lee
So I had a really big passion with that. And then I also, when I was practicing dentistry, one of my hygienists, Jessica, she out of nowhere, 26 years old, healthy, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke nothing, got stage four kidney cancer and died within a couple of months. And they did genetic testing on her. And, you know, they were like, this is bizarre.

00:28:43:22 – 00:29:03:13
Dr. Katie Lee
We’ve never seen a case like this. You know, this is the cancer that old white men get who smoke and drink like you should not have this. And so I started thinking, like, if this could happen to her, right, this could happen to any of us. And this had to be caused by something. And, you know, Mayo Clinic didn’t really have too many answers.

00:29:03:13 – 00:29:14:19
Dr. Katie Lee
And so I just started looking like, how can you live optimally healthy? And so once you open that door, you can kind of start going through going down a rabbit hole with that.

00:29:14:21 – 00:29:40:11
Victoria Peterson
This will be your life’s work for the next 40, 40 years. And you know, I’m sitting here, I can’t help but just think about how unrestricted your mindset is. Like, I haven’t once heard you say, well, I want to do this, but someone told me I couldn’t or I wanted to do this, but it was too expensive or I wanted to do this, but I don’t know if our patients could get reimbursed for it.

00:29:40:11 – 00:29:50:05
Victoria Peterson
So we didn’t do it. I don’t hear a single restriction in in your delivery on the passion you have for getting people healthy.

00:29:50:06 – 00:29:53:23
Dr. Katie Lee
Yeah, I always say I’ll find a way or make a way.

00:29:54:00 – 00:29:56:18
Victoria Peterson
Yeah. Wow. Oh, wow.

00:29:56:19 – 00:29:59:16
Speaker 4
I feel so much.

00:29:59:18 – 00:30:05:23
Dr. Katie Lee
Out there. Right? And there’s a way to do everything. You just have to find out what it is.

00:30:06:00 – 00:30:30:20
Victoria Peterson
For doctors who might be listening that are in a stage of their philosophy of care, where they’re at that general practice, learning, you know, proficiency. And or they’ve already started expanding, they’ve done extended CE, and they’re ready to take that cross, cross that threshold of comprehensive and start diagnosing by risk factor. What’s what’s some encouragement you would give them?

00:30:30:22 – 00:30:58:20
Dr. Katie Lee
I would say that is so exciting because, you know, when you’re in the I’m going to call it the mechanical stage of dentistry, right? That’s pretty easy. Not easy, but tangible and kind of finite, right? It’s learn these skills, learn this occlusion. These are the materials. This is the bonding system. Here’s your case selection. And that’s it. When you start moving into more comprehensive type of dentistry there is no ceiling.

00:30:58:20 – 00:31:16:15
Dr. Katie Lee
There is no wall. And so the mount I feel like I’m drinking through a fire hose. I feel like I’m just out of dental school. All the stuff that I’m learning every single day. And so it’s really exciting. So I would say buckle up because the more you know, the more or the more you learn, the more you realize, the more you don’t know.

00:31:16:15 – 00:31:23:01
Dr. Katie Lee
And I’m like, I mean, you teach me stuff every time I talk with you, I’m like, oh, I haven’t heard about that yet. Now I’m down this rabbit hole trying to learn about this.

00:31:23:01 – 00:31:24:02
Speaker 4
And I know.

00:31:24:04 – 00:31:25:20
Dr. Katie Lee
Ending, which is really exciting.

00:31:26:00 – 00:31:52:02
Victoria Peterson
Well, you fire me up as well. I have not been a clinician since 1995, but because of people like you, I am more passionate than ever that doctors build million dollar modern periodontal therapists within their office. And I think every hygienist out there. Well, I can’t say every, but I think given the opportunity, the hygienist that I know, nine out of ten would say, sign me up.

00:31:52:05 – 00:32:26:08
Victoria Peterson
You know, when we’re talking about the new discloses and the desiccant and the air polishing materials and equipment that keep them from wearing out their bodies. So it’s so exciting. So I’m in my last phase of this part of my career, and I you you’ll I hope you don’t believe this, but it is astounding to me. I am headed to Jacksonville, Florida in June for my 44th Dental Hygiene class reunion.

00:32:26:09 – 00:32:27:09
Speaker 4
I love it.

00:32:27:10 – 00:33:00:05
Victoria Peterson
It’s been a long journey from, you know, belt driven, slow speed hand pieces, and I exited out of clinical doing laser therapies and high in a static material maintenance and things like that. But there’s so much work to still be done. And I think hygienists are a big key to that. And, you know, at a time where there’s labor tensions between doctors and hygienists, you know, they deserve to earn more, and yet they need to do more.

00:33:00:06 – 00:33:14:13
Victoria Peterson
They need to provide more. So we’ve talked about the doctor going from mechanical to biological or risk factor, but they have to take their team on that journey with them and provide the resources. Absolutely.

00:33:14:13 – 00:33:33:10
Dr. Katie Lee
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve always been a big proponent of hygienists. They’re the ones really on the front line when you practice the way that I do, because they’re the ones that are really modulating the inflammatory burden of the body through the mouth, because the mouth is the main contributor to systemic inflammation. So they have a very important role.

00:33:33:12 – 00:33:57:08
Victoria Peterson
Doctor Katie, thank you so much for being here. I have wanted to interview on the podcast for well over a year, so I’m glad that our schedules have finally coordinated with that again. We’re going to be in Centennial, Colorado in September. September 10th and 11th in Doctor Katie Lee’s office, where you get to tour it, you get to see for yourself what could your bigger vision be?

00:33:57:12 – 00:34:22:17
Victoria Peterson
Not saying that there’s a right way or a wrong way, but there is a way to to become more. And there’s pioneers like doctor Lee who are showing us the way. So we’ll be there, along with doctor Wade Keefer, who is a mentor at the center, along with Sarah Hansen, who’s going to show you that dental insurance is your most expensive marketing vehicle that you can ever engage in.

00:34:22:21 – 00:34:48:10
Victoria Peterson
We just did the numbers on that typically cost $1,600 per patient to get them to walk through the door when you look, when you look at the write offs, compared to 150 to $300 with traditional marketing. So we’re going to be talking about how how your message needs to overcome the, the restrictions of of your capitation plans and your PPO plans.

00:34:48:10 – 00:35:10:15
Victoria Peterson
We also have Joanne Miles and Carrie Miller, who are two of the best IGP coaches I have ever had on my team. They’re going to show you where all the money leaks are in the practice. So that’s what unrestricted is about. It’s about setting up a business model where your philosophy of care shines through everything, and we find every money leak.

00:35:10:15 – 00:35:32:01
Victoria Peterson
We find every mindset leak, we find every communication hand off. We find the clinical diagnostic leaks and help you systematically close those leaks so that you can, I don’t know, live your dream as a clinician and take care of people, because at the end of the day, I think that’s what that really is all about.

00:35:32:03 – 00:35:36:09
Dr. Katie Lee
Yeah, it allows you to have fun and live out your philosophy of care when all that’s buttoned.

00:35:36:09 – 00:35:36:22
Speaker 4
Up.

00:35:36:24 – 00:35:44:04
Victoria Peterson
To the living philosophy. I love that doctor Lee. How can people find out more about collective health society?

00:35:44:09 – 00:35:59:09
Dr. Katie Lee
Yeah, so they could go to our website, which is Collective Health Society. Feel free to check us out there. Or you can find me on Instagram under the Collective Health Society or at Katie Leeds.

00:35:59:11 – 00:36:06:13
Victoria Peterson
I love it and I want to point out if you don’t live in Colorado, there are still ways to work with you through your educational center.

00:36:06:15 – 00:36:07:05
Speaker 4
Yes.

00:36:07:07 – 00:36:30:02
Dr. Katie Lee
Yeah. So it’s called Collective Education Society. And so we have a monthly study club that is the second Thursday of every month. It’s called the integrative or sorry Biological Dentistry and Integrative Health Study Club. So we cover all topics. We just had one doctor, Brian Harris, who’s a big time cosmetic dentist, came out last week and did one on veneers with the sprint Ray Midas.

00:36:30:03 – 00:36:50:09
Dr. Katie Lee
And then we have some coming up with strongman on implants, strongman. And so titanium versus ceramic implants. I place both. We talk about ozone, then we talk about systemic health. So check us out. But we also have other CE events and courses too. So if they want to go to the website it’s collective education society.

00:36:50:09 – 00:37:00:20
Victoria Peterson
Com Katie, thank you so much for being such a bright light in our industry. You are paving the path for so many to come along beside you and take this journey.

00:37:00:21 – 00:37:02:11
Dr. Katie Lee
Thank you. Thanks for having me.