Lasting Impressions | Summer 2016

Habit NSU COLLEGE OF DENTAL MEDICINE x 21 is striving to vanquish tobacco use in the CDM’s dental patients. “By the time they become practitioners, all CDM dental students will have been well trained on tobacco cessation,” and associate professor. The students also will have provided a three-to-five minute motivational intervention to help patients explore options to quit tobacco use. In this interaction, the students ask each patient about tobacco use, discuss the health effects of tobacco and the benefits of quitting, and refer them to the AHEC Tobacco Cessation Program. “We want prevention and referral to become natural for all these students,” said Lina Mejia, D.D.S., M.S., M.P.H., a CDM assistant professor of oral medicine and diagnostic sciences. The potential impact of the CDM graduates in reducing tobacco use in the future is enormous. • Each year, the College of Dental Medicine graduates approximately 125 dentists. • In each year of practice, these dental graduates will cumulatively have approximately 250,000 patient visits. • Based on an average 30-year practice life, each graduating class will have about 7.5 million dental patient visits. • Based on recent reports that 17.7 percent of adult Floridians smoke, the projected number of patient visits by smokers treated by each graduat- ing class in its lifetime of practice will equal well more than 1 million. That represents a million chances to save lives. And that’s just the graduating dental students. In addition, NSU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine and College of Nursing also are weaving tobacco cessation into their educational curriculum to address tobacco use with their patients and make referrals to cessation groups. “There is nothing you will ever learn in school that is more important than how to work with your patients to help them stop smoking,” Steven Zucker, D.M.D., M.Ed. , told a lecture hall packed with first-year dental students. “Tobacco use is the chief avoidable cause of death in this country. You can make a huge difference,” added Zucker, who serves as associate dean at NSU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, director of the AHEC Cessation and Tobacco Training Program, and professor of community dentistry at the CDM. Tobacco use contributes to a wide range of health issues, including oral cancer. For decades, dentists and hygienists have been at the forefront of screening oral cancer, which has a high survival rate if caught early. It was a natural progression for these profes- sionals to move from oral health to overall health. Learning to apply motivational interviewing was the key. Developed by psychologists, motiva- tional interviewing takes a respectful and supportive approach. No scolding or lecturing—just an effective way in which patients and health care provid- ers can discuss a difficult behavior and work collaboratively toward change— in this case, quitting smoking. Third-year dental student Israel Gross has found that the motivational interviewing approach works well for all sorts of persuasion, from quitting smoking to flossing regularly. “It’s comprehensive and realistic in its goals,” Gross said. “They’re not training us to be social workers. Our job is to point patients in the right direction and get them enrolled in a free quit-smoking H said Abby J. Brodie, D.M.D., M.S., associate dean for academic affairs