Dr. Victoria Sampson

So yeah, smoking and vaping, neither of them are good for the oral microbiome.

It goes back to dry mouth.

So smoking will dry your mouth out and then you don't have the saliva and the saliva can't do what it wants to.

It stops vascularization, so it stops blood flow to your mouth.

And so a lot of smokers actually will not have bleeding gums.

That doesn't mean that they don't have gum disease, but because they are smoking so much, the blood vessels are already really tight and constricted from the nicotine.

So they don't ever get bleeding gums, even though they have gum disease.

And then the third thing is that actually we know that smoking is very strongly associated.

It's one of the biggest risk factors for gum disease.

We have a clinic in central London called the Health Society.

We opened about a year and a half ago now.

And our aim was to put the mouth back into the body, to explain to patients exactly what's going on in their mouth.

And we can do that through microbiome testing, other saliva tests.

We look at your blood glucose levels, your vitamin D levels.

We've got packages.

We have an infrared sauna.

We have a nutritionist.

And the idea is that we're working all together because one of the

One of the issues I was seeing was that patients, they want to understand what's going on in their mouth and they want to optimize it, but they don't understand a lot of what dentistry is all about.

We used to live in a world where the dentist would say, okay, you need two fillings and you've got gum disease and you're not brushing your teeth.