Champion for CAMBRA!

For nearly a decade, the CDA Foundation has been an active participant in promoting Caries Management by Risk Assessment in dental practices.

Last January, the Foundation hosted a CAMBRA symposium, gathering researchers, practitioners, policy advocates and insurers, charged with coming up with a strategy to guide the CAMBRA movement. One of the panel speakers was V. Kim Kutsch, DMD, a private practice dentist from Oregon who manages a successful CAMBRA based practice in addition to serving as acting CEO of Oral BioTech, maker of CariFreeproducts, a platinum sponsor of the symposium.

Dr. Kutsch has dedicated his career to seeking out and developing new ideas, technologies and treatment methods that focus on patient care. In the process, he has become an internationally recognized expert in many topics including minimally invasive procedures.

“Minimally invasive dentistry is a rapidly growing trend in our profession and it is a trend we need to take seriously – it’s better for the patient and it’s better for the practice,” Dr.Kutsch said.  “For years, we’ve told our patients to eat less sweets and brush and floss more…but the reality is, caries is a disease about pH and we need to start thinking in terms of demineralization and remineralization as we are looking at the interaction between the pH and the teeth. Once we have educated our patients on what drives the disease and how to correct those factors, then we can recommend products and a prevention program.”

According to Dr. Kutsch, CariFree is  actually a system for CAMBRA that provides a simple protocol for assessing patients’ risk for decay along with a real-time, chairside test to measure bacterial load.  It also includes products for both children and adults that treat and prevent the infection, lowering the risk of future decay.  All CariFree products combine the proven benefits of fluoride and xylitol, along with proprietary neutralizing pH+ technology. Oral BioTech, maker of CariFree products was founded with the purpose of providing the dental profession with a complete solution to treating dental caries as a bacterial infection.

A group of dentists, including Dr. Kutsch, university professors, and other professionals formed Oral BioTech to create products that could make it easy for dentists to test for this bacterial infection and to be able to prescribe highly effective treatment programs.

Dr. Kutsch holds numerous patents for dental materials and technologies, publishes regularly in magazines, journals and textbooks, and speaks at dental meetings throughout the world. He is the founder of the World Congress of Minimally Invasive Dentistry and the Academy of Laser Dentistry.

Manuscripts by Dr. Kutsch and other speakers from the CAMBRA symposium will be published in the October and November 2011 issues of the CDA Journal.

Source: http://www.cdafoundation.org/library/docs/newsletter/0511/article4.htm