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New procedures, new app help autistic kids at the dentist

A WMU student has teamed up with a Grand Rapids dentist's office to help workers better connect with patients who have sensory needs.

KENT COUNTY, Michigan — As we close out National Autism Acceptance Month, we’re looking at a new app developed for the autistic community and highlighting a local dentistry group that’s opened its doors to those with intellectual or developmental disabilities.

“Us at Growing Smiles accept patients with autism,” said Traci Beals, a registered dental hygienist. “We know dentistry is a need. We want to bridge that gap.”

It may be hard to believe, but it can be challenging for autistic patients to find a dental office that meets their comfort level and ability. Sometimes, that’s because oral health professionals don’t have much experience working with people who have intellectual or developmental disabilities.

“Dental schools were not required to teach about treating patients with disabilities until 2019,” Holli Seabury, executive director of Delta Dental Foundation, said. “That's why it's not a surprise that many offices don't feel prepared.”

“It's definitely a larger problem than I think I even realized,” said Mallory Fox, an occupational therapy student at Western Michigan University. “So occupational therapy kind of focuses on all daily life skills, but particularly for my final capstone, this project I'm doing is pairing with a pediatric dentist's office that sees a lot of autistic kids. From what I've heard and read in the literature, just accessing dental care for autistic individuals in general is just very challenging. It's a very sensory overloading experience.”

Credit: WZZM

For the past few months, Fox has been working with Growing Smiles Pediatric Dentistry in Grand Rapids, helping the workers implement new practices.

“It's a great challenge but very much needed,” Beals said. “We love having Mallory in our office to open our eyes on how the body responds to sensory. So she's brought a lot new sensory approaches to us to help with a child. It's been fabulous.”

Before being paired up with Fox, the team at Growing Smiles was already trying to be sensitive to the needs of everyone, Beals said.

Credit: WZZM

“With kids that have a sensory processing disorder, we have found that we need to do things differently,” she said. “We have to meet the child where they're at with their needs. So our appointment changes for those kids. We noticed that they cannot be around a lot of sound or bright lights. So we have special rooms that we have designed that are closed. We can turn the lights down, and we can make that setting a little bit less stimulating for them. We do a lot of things that are process-based. So ‘I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do, I'm going to show you how, I'm going to do it, and we're going to do it. We're going to open your mouth for three seconds.’ I have found working with these individuals that if you give them an end goal and they know exactly what you're going to do, it can help them just kind of destress their body a little bit.”

A new app called All Smiles Shine is also helping out. Seabury is very familiar with the app, because it was her foundation that funded it.

Credit: Infiniteach

“The app was developed by a group called Infiniteach. They're out of Chicago, and they specialize in creating apps for the autistic population. A number of their developers are autistic, so they really understand how to create these apps,” Seabury said. “The app has a couple of different segments. It has a segment for at-home care, and it's got things like toothbrush tracking and different games to make brushing fun. And then it has a section that prepares you for a dental visit, prepares your child for a dental visit, and talks about the sights and the sounds of the dental office and uses social stories. And then there's resources for caregivers or parents or people with autism, who can help understand how to keep their loved one's mouth healthy.”

“I think it’s a great app,” Fox said. “I think that for those people with autism that really are curious and like to learn, that helps manage their anxiety. There's so much information on there that kind of lays out like ‘this is what's going to happen.’ So they can, in a sense, prep themselves for what's going on. There's another part of the app that has a rating scale on how they respond to different sensory input, and I think that part is really cool, because I think there's a gap in providers, like dental and medical professionals, just awareness of how a person's sensory processing really can impact their participation and their ability to participate. It's not that they don't want to, it's not that they are trying to be a bad kid, or any of those things. It's that these sensory aspects of going to the doctor or going to the dentist are so overwhelming that they can't participate.”

The All Smiles Shine app is free to download in the Apple App Store and on Google Play. To learn more about Growing Smiles Pediatric Dentistry, click here.

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