Interview with Dr. Sinjab

Why is dental care a separate expense from health care?

It has not been connected to the person's overall health by insurance companies. They don't see it as a necessity. They think, if somebody has a tooth infection, just take it out. You know, it's not like, oh, but what about their bite? What about their smile? It's not as important as medical health, where if somebody gets sick from the stomach, and they turn out to have some kind of disease or condition or cancer, where they can then sue or cause huge problems, or there's going to be loss of life. So that's why medical insurances cover more. They're provided by, you know, the government, or they're provided by companies that are employing people. Now when it comes to dental insurance, yes, the government might provide dental insurance for those who are in need, but again, it only covers certain things, necessities, emergency treatment, but it's never cosmetic. And most of dentistry now is focused on preventative care and cosmetic care. So when, when a patient comes in, we don't want the patient to come in after the tooth is broken. You want to fix it before the tooth is broken.

How have advancements improved outcomes in care for patients?

I want to say the advancement in technology, especially in digital dentistry, has made our planning more accurate, we're able to communicate with the labs and with other doctors much better, more accurately. Taking a picture or sending a paper document is much more difficult than sending a scan a three dimensional rendering of someone's teeth or mouth that you can zoom in and out and look at it from all directions is definitely much better.

Can you discuss some programs or initiatives that can or already be implemented in low-income communities to improve access to dental care?

There's also community dental offices where doctors will volunteer, you know, their time once a week or once a month to go and provide free care for these patients. I think to make it better would be to provide incentive for more volunteers, maybe becoming making it a more demanding position. If I am incentivized to volunteer, I will be able to, I will end up forcing myself to volunteer because I have something coming from it. For example, the government says we will give you a tax break. You will be required to do less continuing education credits if you're volunteering. Then I'm more incentivized to do that. And I'll say, Okay, I'm gonna try to volunteer once a month. And if everybody does that, then you might have way more volunteering clinics, more availability. So I think that that might be one of the ways to do that, or incentivizing local dental offices to offer care in their practice to those patients.

Every 3 years, Michigan dentists have to renew their dental license. What role do these continued education courses you must attend help dentists catch up with new technologies and knowledge, and how does this impact patient treatment?

When we're attending these lectures or watching the videos or doing courses, the courses are usually up to date. They're showing us what is, what is being done out there that's new. That has changed from when we were doing dentistry back in school. So it keeps us up to date. It increases or enhances our knowledge, because dentistry or dental school cannot teach you everything, right? Four years is not enough, and even though you graduate knowing a lot, then you find out that there's a lot more that you still need to learn. And everybody in dentistry graduates knowing a little bit about everything, but then you end up liking a certain field in the dentistry that you want to focus more on. I know dentists that do a lot of orthodontic treatment. I know a lot of dentists that do a lot of root canals. I know doctors dentists that do a lot of extractions and surgeries. And so based on what your or cosmetic work, so based on that, that's when you start taking more courses

How do small steps such as applying fluoride and sealants prevent the need for expensive dental procedures in the future?

The term that you're looking for is preventative dentistry. You're trying to stop the condition from happening before it happens. What happens? Okay, so when you're doing fluorides or sealants and stuff like that, you're helping the tooth not develop a cavity faster than it should, because teeth are softer. Patients are having a lot of sugar, they get cavities. You prevent that from happening or slow it down. Now there's less of a need for expensive treatments like fillings or crowns or root canals. Those are the cheaper preventative cares, sealants and fluoride six month cleanings prevent help you prevent gum disease, help catch things early during your examinations, assessing the bite and doing orthodontic treatment to straighten the teeth that will help you bite better, clean better, preventing fractures and preventing you know problems on those teeth. Yeah, they do make a big difference.

Dental anesthetics are a complex part of the field, especially when it comes to surgeries. Do advancements in anesthesia change patient care and comfort, and how so?

IV sedation eases anxiety; dental anesthesia numbs pain. Many fear the needle, often due to past bad experiences. We use calming techniques—like numbing gel, cheek stretching, and slow injections—to make it painless. Sedation helps patients stay relaxed or forget the procedure entirely, changing how they view dental care.

How do you think costs will be impacted by these advancements in technology to affect accessibility and affordability, especially to those in low-income communities?

The more the the more technology that's coming in, the more expensive things are becoming, because when somebody invents something new, they need to pay for that invention, the patents, the production, the lawyers, the manufacturing. So it becomes very expensive in the beginning. So offices that are providing cheaper dental care or free dental care, are not able to pay those prices. However, the more technology we're getting, the cheaper the older technology is becoming. So pretty soon, we're going to be doing a lot of augmented reality or virtual reality treatments. 

How have improvements in the treatment affected the patient's comfort and satisfaction with the outcome?

The treatment outcome becomes more accurate, so they're happier, but also the procedure becomes shorter because you don't need to stop and check and stop and check and guess and you are, you're, you're guided by these guys. So the person realizes that that implant only took 15 minutes instead of an hour, like last time. Well, I had the guide. It saved me. It saved me time.