Steven R. Olmos, DDS

DABCP, DABCDSM, DABDSM, FAAOP, FAACP, FICCMO, FADI, FIAO, FACD, FPFA

WHY TMJ & SLEEP THERAPY CENTRES?

Many years ago, I decided to redirect my energies to teaching. I figured that if I saw patients 24 hours per day, seven days a week, I would still be able to help X number of patients, however if I taught others to help people with these problems then the effect would be exponential.

Through teaching I have been blessed to meet dentists who are exceptional in intelligence and compassion for others. I feel great passion for helping others and quite frankly it is difficult for me to observe a person in pain. Pain can be from physical trauma (micro or macro), emotional, or from just knowing that something is wrong. Perhaps the chief symptom is depression and fatigue. The passion for helping others and the struggle with dental therapies for systemic problems has driven me to find solutions that are based in finding origins of the symptoms people complain about.

I have had success in helping people who suffer from these problems and I am in a constant search for improved ways to accomplish optimal treatment outcomes. The demands on my time with a busy practice lent itself to developing business systems for efficiency and efficacy. This was necessary as most dentists started out as I did treating only musculoskeletal pain, (TMD), neuralgias and headaches. They did this part-time and were not efficient or efficacious enough to make a living doing so.

It became clear to me that sleep disturbed from pain and that not breathing are significantly comorbid in these patients. The dentists who still treat chronic pain as a separate entity without treating breathing are constantly managing symptoms with medications and or physical medicine and therapy. Dentists who treat only breathing pathology are blindsided with the patients that develop jaw joint pathology or occlusion changes as they lack significant knowledge and expertise in these areas.They lacked an understanding that these are medical problems with dental solutions.

In order to properly address diagnosis, treatment and billing we must follow the “Medical Model”.

I have been sharing these techniques and systems to dentists for many years. Early into sharing what I was doing in San Diego I had dentists coming up and inquiring about having an office limited to chronic pain and sleep breathing disorders as mine is. These inquiries stimulated a need in me to develop a vision of what we could do with this knowledge base of treatment and financial management systems.

I realized for these techniques that worked so well for me to be accepted, they must be standardized and proven through research. That is adherence to a “System” would insure reproducible success, thus changing the technique from art to science. Standardization of a comprehensive system for TMD, pain and OSA could set a new standard of care. This system would need to be validated through research with the most prized research being multisite data collection. If the data collection were from different countries, it would be even TMJ & Sleep Therapy Centre INTERNATIONAL more valuable. Protocol standardization for intake, diagnosis, and treatment would be essential.

My vision is now to set the standard of care for dental exams to include chronic pain, TMD and OSA. That TMJ & Sleep Therapy Centres be identified with the highest level of care for these disorders, the ‘Mayo Clinic of Dentistry’ if you will. That the TMJ & Sleep Therapy Centre name be identified as the leader for bridging the gap from Medicine to Dentistry. This is being accomplished everyday within the Centre of Excellence network.

Being a “Centre” owner does not mean that the dentist must give up any specialty of dentistry that is currently being performed. It means when a patient is treated for chronic pain, TMD, HA’s or OSA, they are treated to a standardized level of care.

Being a “Centre” owner means you are part of a family of committed people who are all there to help each other. Help may be as part of our Facebook Group where case questions are posted to the group and responses from all over the world taking only minutes. Help may be our collective drive to merge our forces for national and international marketing. Help can also be the comfort knowing your Centre family is comprised of the most knowledgeable people and includes leaders who sit on Boards of the largest and most powerful organizations devoted to these fields. Help is in the form of personal mentorship by me, our amazing staff and a family of like-minded caring people.

If you are interested in becoming part of our Centre family, and please know that all who are interested are not accepted, visit our website: TMJTherapyCentre.com or contact Tiffany Jensen at Tiffany@TMJTherapyCentre.com for personal information.

Sincerely,
Steven R. Olmos, D.D.S.