Changing the narrative on geriatric dental medicine has been a priority for Dr. Kady Rawal ever since dental school in India. In her conversation with the Benco Dental Driving Dentistry Forward podcast host Chuck Cohen she offers two suggestions for every dentist.

Hear what the Lucy Hobbs Project 2016 Woman to Watch award recipient shares at the podcast: HERE.

What inspired Dr. Kady Rawal to change the narrative on geriatric dental medicine?

While in her second year of dental school, Dr. Rawal experienced very personal motivation for a career dedicated to geriatric patients: empathy for her grandmother. At that time, the matriarch of Dr. Rawal’s family had been diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and was experiencing related dental issues with no one able to treat them.

“It’s a multi-organ disease, and a lot was going on in her body at the time. One of her chief complaints was dental. She had a lot of dental issues, a lot of periodontal issues.”

She went from dentist to dentist, specialist to specialist in Mumbai, which is a huge, cosmopolitan city, with extremely trained professionals. None of them felt confident treating her or taking on the liability of an older adult living with co-morbidities and treating her in the dental chair.”

Dr. Kady Rawal talks to Chuck Cohen on the Driving Dentistry Forward podcast about geriatric dental medicine

Today, Dr. Rawal works to resolve that issue in two ways. As a dental educator at Boston University and Harvard University she creates awareness for this burgeoning specialty among the next generation of dentists. And, as a practitioner in a public health setting she cares one-on-one for geriatric patients.

“I’m such a big proponent of the hospital practice, as well as public health practice. Every time I talk to dental students who are deciding what to do with their lives, I push for it….

This type of hospital setting helps me be an academician, a clinician and a researcher. Very selfishly I’m not just having a one-one-one impact on my patients, I can have a larger impact by training the next generation of dentists, publishing and talking about geriatrics.”

What two ideas for treating geriatric dental patients does Dr. Kady Rawal recommend for every dentist?

Dr. Rawal suggests two ideas for every dentist treating geriatric dental patients at the Driving Dentistry Forward podcastHERE.