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Have you started to notice patients showing up to your practice wearing continuous glucose monitors? Do they mention noticing possible bruxism by tracking their sleep via smartwatches and apps on their phones? Are they asking you about the inflammation markers they read about on Instagram?
Welcome to the biohacking age of the wellness industry. No longer a fringe movement, this new focus has gone from boutique to the mainstream. And dentistry is sitting right in the middle of it – whether you realize it or not.
In a recent Dawson Academy webinar, Dr. DeWitt Wilkerson walked through the various ways that biohacking and trends from the wellness industry are beginning to show up in practices – and how to prepare for the future as a dental professional.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a fact to the forefront for the entire world: underlying health conditions matter.
Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and chronic inflammation are just a few of the comorbidities that mean the difference between life and death for COVID-19 patients. And while the pandemic may feel like it’s behind us, the lesson is that it’s not going anywhere.
Over 135 million adults in the US are diabetic or pre-diabetic (more than one in three individuals). Many of them don’t realize it, and those same people may be sitting in your operatory right now with bleeding gums or bone loss.
When we see inflammation in the mouth, the instinct is always to address the issue locally:
But what happens when a patient follows your treatment plan… and things continue on a downward trajectory? While we may tell them to floss more, the reality is that the issue may be a microbial and metabolic one instead.
Dr. Pete Dawson built his philosophy on a principle that still holds: diagnose, diagnose, diagnose — then treat.
That same thinking is now expanding beyond occlusion to whole-health assessment, and the tools to support it are more accessible than ever.
A great example is continuous glucose monitoring. Once reserved exclusively for diabetic patients, CGMs are now readily available over the counter for anyone seeking to understand how their body responds to food, stress, and sleep.
The data is immediate, personal, and often eye-opening — even for patients who consider themselves healthy.
But what makes this relevant to your practice? Patients with the highest blood sugar variability (repeated spikes and crashes throughout the day) face significantly higher risks of chronic disease and systemic inflammation.
That’s the same inflammation that is already showing up in your operatory as bleeding and bone loss. A CGM gives both you and the patient a real-time window into what’s driving it – and you can be sure that they’ll come to you with questions!
The practical application of this is surprisingly simple. Patients can flatten their glucose curves with small, evidence-based adjustments.
Easy-to-incorporate activities such as eating vegetables before carbohydrates, taking a 10-minute walk after meals, and starting the day with a savory breakfast instead of a sweet one are all great ideas. Even adding a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar before eating has been shown to reduce glucose spikes by 30% and insulin response by 20%.
The opportunity for your practice is to guide this process with your patients as they explore their health. Many are already seeking out metabolic health information on their own – and much of that is coming from social media influencers and sources that range from legitimate to outright scams.
This means positioning your practice as the trusted, science-backed resource for metabolic wellness isn’t a stretch. In fact, it’s now becoming a necessity to fight off misinformation. And it’s a natural extension of the care you already provide.
There’s a well-established bidirectional relationship between periodontal disease and diabetes.
It’s a cycle — and dental professionals are positioned to intervene on both sides of it with the help of salivary diagnostics.
Rather than treating empirically based on clinical signs alone, you can utilize salivary pathogen testing to identify the specific high-risk bacteria present.
The top five — AA, PG, TD, TF, and FN — cause the most damage by invading cells, crossing tissue barriers, resisting treatments, and appearing in periodontal disease, cardiovascular events, implant failures, and gut issues. PG can suppress the immune response, hiding inflammation signs while destruction persists.
So how do you implement these ideas?
It’s the same diagnostic rigor Dawson-trained dentists apply to occlusal analysis — now extended to the biological environment. And as patients increasingly expect to see data and results, this approach meets them exactly where they are.
But we’d be remiss to say that wellness dentistry stops at nutrition and microbiology. Sleep quality and airway patency are deeply connected to the clinical presentations you see every day.
Here’s an example: a young patient with worn anterior teeth and a scalloped tongue who is complaining of sore muscles and morning headaches may not have bruxism alone.
She may have an airway problem that’s driving sympathetic dysregulation — her nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight mode all night instead of resting and recovering.
There are a number of screening tools available to help here – for instance, there are a number of apps that measure snoring intensity from a bedside phone.
High-resolution pulse oximetry devices track overnight oxygen desaturation and heart rate fluctuations. Even something as basic as having a family member record a patient sleeping can reveal mouth breathing and obstruction that explain years of unexplained wear and breakdown.
From there, trial therapies like mouth taping and temporary sleep appliances can be screened against these same tools to demonstrate measurable improvement before you commit to definitive treatment.
You can use these to collect objective data that shows the patient (and yourself) whether the approach is working. This is the kind of evidence-based screening that builds trust and elevates your standard of care.
The vast majority of consumers now rank “better health” as one of their top personal priorities. They want better sleep and nutrition, and they hope for a better appearance.
In a way, these are the very outcomes dental professionals influence each and every day.
The practices that recognize this and begin to build systems around it won’t just improve their clinical outcomes, but they’ll begin to meet their patients where they are – offering guided, science-backed care that the wellness market is desperate for.
The future of complete dentistry is rooted in occlusion, restorations, and aesthetics. But it’s also about the efforts to become a healthcare provider who sees the whole patient. They ask the deeper questions, and they have the tools ready to find real answers.
The future is here. Is your practice ready to adapt and grow?
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