The Practicon Viewpoint by Ann Page Griffin

GIVE A SHOUT OUT FOR SEALANTS

In a recent blog, I shared an acrostic about sealants and encouraged you to reproduce the piece to help educate your patients about the efficacy of sealants for primary or permanent teeth. The first letters of each line spelled the phrase: Do Seal Out Decay. If you’ve not seen the acrostic, please see Practicon’s archived blogs.

If you are hesitant to recommend sealants to your patients consistently, let me share a quote from The Journal of the American Dental Association. In a review of the 2016 literature focused on sealants, the article said “available evidence suggests that sealants are effective and safe to prevent or arrest the progression of noncavitated carious lesions, compared with a control without sealants or fluoride varnish.”

Sufficient evidence-based information exists to assure your patients that sealants help prevent and stop caries and are safe for general use. So, once again, I encourage you to do research on the evidence of sealants’ safety and effectiveness, explore the wide variety of brands on the market to choose the one you prefer to use and recommend it with confidence to your patients.