The American Academy of Pediatrics and The American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry both recommend seeing dentist at 1 year of age. It’s important to come at 1 year old age to find a dental home; a place where your child can feel comfortable, a place to come if an emergency occurs, and a doctor to call, text or email with any questions. We want to make sure your child always has a great experience at the dentist. This is accomplished by starting young and speaking positively about the dentist. We want to teach you tricks and habits to maintain a healthy mouth for your child, even if there were 5 birthday parties that week. We also want to make sure your child is growing and developing correctly. There are many things that if detected early, we can change easily with early interevention.

The first visit is all about having fun! We give your child a tour of our office. We show them where all the fun toys are hiding and how to climb into our fort. We work on making your child comfortable coming to our office. We have fun playing around the office and meeting our team. Once your child is comfortable we start the dental exam. We check their teeth, their gums, and tongue. Dr. Kimi makes sure they are developing correctly. We spend time to educate how to have a healthy mouth for life. We tickle their mouth clean. We establish a dental home- a place to call, text, or email with questions and a place for dental emergencies.

In using the term biological dentistry, we are describing a philosophy that can apply to all facets of dental practice and to health care in general: Always seek the safest, least toxic way to accomplish the mission of treatment, all the goals of modern dentistry, and do it while treading as lightly as possible on the patient’s biological terrain. A more biocompatible approach to oral health is the hallmark of biological dentistry.

By making distinctions – some obvious, and some subtle – among the available materials and procedures, we can reduce the impact on our patients’ biological responses. Our sense of duty to advocate for the well-being of our patients should make biocompatibility a high priority, and the fact that there are now so many new ways to make dentistry work better gives us the opportunity to do just that.