Working interview for RDH to join NON-INVASIVE dental team at 450 Sutter in SF 

Seeking an RDH to join a world-class innovative non-invasive dental team. The goal is for you to gradually take on running point for patient education & gum disease management at our first site.

Starting with working interview. Initially can be 1-3 days per week Weds-Fri. Can expand to full time if desired in the coming months.

Us

Our site: drkeeper.com

We designed our practice to create a gateway to trustworthy dental care for the 50% of adults that do not access dentistry any given year, because they fear: overtreatment, pain, expense, and judgement.

We do all treatment that can be done without needles & drills. 40% of our patients have not had a visit in 3+ years. Many of them are very healthy, and they validate the below. We refer treatment we do not do to a network of trustworthy dental teams.

We are a new practice, but we are growing fast. We have had 1,200 patients in 16 months since starting from zero.

Philosophy

Caries: We are pioneers in non-invasive caries management. We brought SDF, Curodont, and Iodine into caries management in the US, created the SMART technique, and more. We also rediscovered that nutrition is primary to caries. The "time of sugar on teeth" causes microbial dysbiosis, the microbes use sugar to make plaque/biofilm & the acid that is held against the teeth by plaque/biofilm, which dissolves the teeth... And nutrients like Arginine and vitamin B6 support healthy microbes to balance this out, vitamin D fuels healthy saliva, etc. We treat caries medically without removal of tooth structure.

Periodontal management: Our philosophy comes from Harvard / Forsyth: gum disease is caused by systemic inflammation finding local irritation (calculus), which drives vicious cycles of local inflammation via pathogenic bacteria. The systemic inflammation primarily comes from overprocessed food, and can be balanced by anti-inflammatory foods & supplements. We do remove calculus, to decrease the local irritation.

Our approach to managing gum disease:

• nutritional counseling on increasing anti-inflammatory foods & supplements and decreasing inflammatory foods (to decrease systemic inflammation)
• removing calculus (to decrease local irritation)
• applying topical antimicrobials (to stop the cycle of pathogenic bacteria)

Our toolset:

• Parkell DuraTips, Cavitron SPS, hand scalars
• EMS AirFlow, traditional cordless prophy motors
• PerioDT / HybenX
• Povidone-Iodine (PoviOne) / hypochlorite
• Synapse Dental Pain Eraser
• Topical Lido/Tetra/Prilo/Phenyephrine
• Diclonine rinse

Responsibilities:

• Initially you will join the team of the dentist, RDA, RDA-EF2, on 3 column days. The RDA-EF2 does most fillings. You scale, contribute to turning over rooms & sterilization, and learn our approach to nutritional counseling / teaching information & style.
• As you gain comfort with the practice, we may develop a separate 1-2 columns for you to lead, and certainly will prioritize your time for SRPs, but we are all team players and help each other as needed.
• SRPs
• When not doing SRPs, we have 3 team members touch each patient: RDA for imaging + coronal polish + OHI, RDH for scaling + nutritional counseling, DDS for diagnosis + treatment plan.

Differentiators:

• Speaking another language common in SF for folks who aren't fluent in English, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, Tagolog, Spanish
• Deep comfort with CDT coding (differentiating prophy vs debridement vs SRP, etc.)
• Knowledge of the role of nutrition in oral health

Requirements:

• Active RDH license in CA
• All certifications up to date (BLS, etc.)
• Openness to learn new approaches (such as SRP with advanced topicals & Synapse, minimizing hand scaling, etc.)
• Comfort challenging the dentist on ideas & details of philosophy
• Team player with respect of all team members
• Foster a positive environment for patients & staff
• Lifting objects e.g. 25 lb