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VIDEO - DUwHF #776 - Leona Meditz Bush
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AUDIO - DUwHF #776 - Leona Meditz Bush
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Leona Meditz Bush is a practice systems analyst, developer, practice advisor and coach. Most of all, Leona is an innovator. Her consulting firm: Meditz Management successfully implements new technologies, protocols and systems for about 1000 practitioners nationally since 1979. Ms. Meditz Bush led sales for a major dental practice management consulting firm for 10 years. She can relate to owners, managers and technicians alike and offers a balance between technical competency and business acumen. In Feb 2007, Leona developed advance periodontal protocols using Laser Assisted Periodontal Therapy for Centers for Dental Medicine. Leona currently coaches top tier dental practices seeking higher productivity with less stress. Her coaching work revealed the importance of patient co-management with physicians, so Ms. Meditz Bush founded the Health Care Professionals Wellness Network. HCP Wellnet promotes patient advocacy between dentists and physicians. Leona’s case study co-management examples are published in Dentistry Today’s May 2014 issue. That year, Ms. Meditz Bush started developing the Clean Kiss™ Organic Oral Care products, the first to use nutraceuticals, mouthwash, toothpaste and breath spray as a system to kill pathogenic bacteria that leads to chronic inflammatory diseases using botanicals instead of chemicals. Clean Kiss also fights decay without Fluoride. Clean Kiss™ refers patients to Clean Kiss™ trained dentists for a Kiss of Health™ Assessment as a tool to build dental/physician patient co-management and patient referral networks. As a national speaker, columnist and writer, Leona is available to show study clubs how dentists and physicians can work together to “make health contagious”.
www.cleankiss.com
Howard Farran: It is just a huge honor today to be celebrating my 20,000 day birthday. I couldn't think of a better guest than to bring you on. I'll be 55 August 29 but I will be 30,000 days old until I'm 82. We've been neighbors for several decades. Let me read you this. This is Liona Metitz Bush with Health Care Professionals Wellness Network. Her websites are gowellnet.com and cleankiss.com. I figured that would get your attention. Anytime someone says would you like a clean kiss ...
Liona Metitz Bush is a practice systems analyst, developer, practice adviser and coach. Most of all, Liona is an innovator. Her consulting firm Metitz Management successfully implements new technologies, protocols and systems for about 1000 practitioners nationally since 1979. Ms. Bush led sales for a major dental practice management consulting firm for ten years and that was a friend of the show, Michael Schuster. You worked for him for a decade and when I was in college, undergrad and dental school, my assistant Jan was actually his assistant and then when i opened up, she jumped over with me and she's been there 30 years now. We celebrated our office was 30 years old last month.
Leona Meditz: Must have broke her in right.
Howard Farran: Yeah. I love Schuster. He's an amazing man. You led is sales for him for ten years. She could relate to owners, managers, and technicians alike and offer a balance between technological competence and business acumen. In February 2007, Leona developed advanced paradental protocols using laser-assisted paradental therapy for centers for dental medicine. Leona currently coaches top tier dental practices, seeking higher productivity with less stress. Her coaching work revealed the importance of patient co-management with physicians. Ms. Metitz Bush founded the Health Care Professionals Wellness Network, eight CP Well Net promotes patient advocacy between dentists and physicians.
Leona's case study co-management examples are published in Dentistry Today, the May 2014 issue. That year Ms. Meditz Bush started developing the Clean Kiss organic oral care products, and the first to use nutraceuticals, mouthwash, toothpaste and breath spray as a system to kill pathogenic bacteria that lead to chronic inflammatory diseases using botanicals and a set of chemicals. Clean Kiss also fights decay with fluoride. Clean Kiss refers patients to clean kiss trained dentists for a kiss of health assessment as a tool to build dental physician patient co-management and patient referral networks. As a national speaker, columnist and writer, Leona is available to show study clubs how dentists and physicians can work together to make help.
I just want to say I know you guys are all driving and can't take notes so Ryan always ... We always get a transcript of all of our podcasts so for notes and all that on the dentaltown.com website there's transcripts. Also I retweet their last tweet and on Twitter I am @HowardFarran. She's @cleankisshealth and I want to point something out. Her last tweet was actually a blog she wrote on Dental Town. It's called male clinics says "Clorox actually raised heart attack risk, blood pressure."
I want to tell you on something when people are doing these blogs. Remember when you're reading a Dental Town magazine, article or blog or you taken an online C-course, if you like it share it with your homies. All you've got to do, if you look on the deal there's a share button. If you click Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Google Plus, all that stuff. Thanks for writing that blog and I just shared it again.
Thanks for coming over to the house today on my birthday.
Leona Meditz: You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
Howard Farran: Man, how many years have you been in dentistry?
Leona Meditz: Since 1997.
Howard Farran: Mike Schuster was your debut?
Leona Meditz: Yes, he was. Before that I worked with ophthalmologists. I helped bring one-day service into the valley. I was the first one-day service optical shop so when I say I'm an innovator, I've been an innovator for a very long time.
Howard Farran: That's weird because you know who else is an ophthalmologist and then became a dentist and then came out with toothpaste? Bob Bips and Rembrandt.
Leona Meditz: Oh.
Howard Farran: He credits. He just passed away. We had him on the show. I think he passed away at 82, 83. I think 82. I'll turn 30,000 days old. Bob went 30,000 days. He said that by being an ophthalmologist he noticed so much about all the colors, so then that's what made him start dental materials because everything was amalgam and gold. He said cross training between ophthalmology and dentistry just made him see things so differently. Then he started Rembrandt toothpaste because he said all the toothpastes were made for amalgams and crowns and they were scratching the luster off his dental materials and then he also thought why should toothpaste cost three bucks. Why should it be a commodity. He was like Starbucks. We need a Starbucks coffee and he came out with an eight, nine dollar tube of toothpaste.
Leona Meditz: Well, one of the things that innovation does is it creates ... you're either wildly successful or you're horrible a disaster, a failure. Sometimes you are both at the same time. What happened was when I was working with the Schuster Center, I realized that they were all about health. They were all about dental health, getting the bite right. Helping TMD to go away and putting patients through a plan that would get them dentally healthy. They understood periodontal disease but they didn't have a protocol on what to do about it.
When I joined right after that, directly after that, I left Doctor Schuster and two days later I was working for the Centers for Dental Medicine and I started to develop protocols with them because they had a laser but so we had a laser, we knew how to turn it on, but we did not know how to get the case accepted with the patient, how to diagnose, how to treatment plan, how to prevent the treatment-
Howard Farran: Who was the Centers for Dental Medicine?
Leona Meditz: Centers for Dental Medicine actually Jim Rodie recommended me to Centers for Dental Medicine because when I was with ophthalmology I created programs for ophthalmologists through Smart Practice.
Howard Farran: Jim and Naomi Rodie.
Leona Meditz: Yeah. Jim Rodie referred me to Bob Schulhof, and Bob Schulhof had Centers for Dental Medicine. I actually named Centers for Dental Medicine.
Howard Farran: How do you spell Schulhof?
Leona Meditz: S-C-H-U-L-, S-C-H-U-L-H-O-F. He passed away and so the story is is first of all you said I created toothpaste with fluoride. You misspoke. It's not fluoride. Actually the toothpaste has vitamin B12 in it. It's red.
Howard Farran: That's the toothpaste?
Leona Meditz: This is the toothpaste and you'd have to open it. It's red and because vitamin B12 is red. There is nothing artificial in this whatsoever so you can see it's red. That's because it has vitamin B12 in it. Vitamin B12 does two things. First of all, we have-
Howard Farran: Need a tissue?
Leona Meditz: Yeah (laughter). First of all, we have a vitamin B12 deficiency because of our high-sugar diet. Vitamin B12 breaks down sugar so when you brush your teeth with this you are breaking down sugar and of course if you break down sugar you can't have decay. It's the natural organic way of making, fighting decay without fluoride.
Howard Farran: It's amazing because I was heavily involved in [inaudible 00:08:20] New Phoenix in 89' and then it expired 20 years later and we did it. Me and Jack Gellenburgh, the dean of the dental school and were on all these debates and having done it twice, 20 years apart 1/4 of America is violently opposed to fluoride. It's a Communist plot. It's an neuro toxin and all this. As a business person I always thought about debates, man. If you came out with a no fluoride toothpaste, you've got 1/4 of the market.
Leona Meditz: It works. Yeah. Exactly.
Howard Farran: There's a lot of evidence, international epidemiological evidence that fluorinated water really isn't the change because when you look at Singapore with fluorinated water, Japan without it and you look at their DMFT rates, they're falling equally. When you start looking all around the world what's really bringing down the DMFT rate is when the humans change their behavior. What they're seeing the most that they can record is the children are doing whatever mom is doing, not what dad's doing.
Leona Meditz: Interesting.
Howard Farran: If the Mona Lisa looks weird because she had shaved eyebrows. If your mom I shaving her eyebrows and you're in Paris a hundred years ago you shaved your eyebrows. American girls shave their legs, they don't in Portugal. If little kids are standing in the bathroom, whatever mom is doing, if she uses deodorant, they'll use deodorant. If she never used deodorant, they won't.
Leona Meditz: Because they're modeling after their mom, sure.
Howard Farran: Yeah.
Leona Meditz: Sure, that makes sense.
Howard Farran: It's really can this motivate them to change your behavior?
Leona Meditz: Well, and that's really what my whole life's work has been about. When I worked with Practice management, it was changing behavior and it was changing models. It was changing behavior to work those models. It's changed management. That's basically what my whole life has been about. When I went to Centers for Dental Medicine they had this great machine called the laser. I was laughed at when I called. I cold-called dental offices and I was laughed at when I said the laser will help with periodontal disease. They thought it was a big joke. They're not laughing anymore.
The point is is that it's always been changed management. You're always. That's why I say I work with top tier dental practices because these are the movers and shakers. They're not the ones when a dentist says "show me all the research that proves that it works." I almost want to hang up on them, not because research is bad but by the time the research is developed it's already the standard for the industry because somebody has to pay for all that.
What I do is I give them the research of my ingredients and there is four pages worth of research that shows what each thing does. If you go to cleankiss.com on the resources tab or you can wait until dental town because I'm going to be putting the blogs on both from now on. If you go there you'll see an article that shows what each thing does. This happens to be for our bone support but I have one for both for the whole system.
The first thing to understand is I'm about innovation, creating new things, new ways, better ways of doing something that gets a better result.
The second thing I'm about is creating systems to make that work. If you know the oral system, the connection is real and you believe in that. You believe all of the research from the American Heart Association. I have a magazine called Medical Dental News and on the last ... There is an entire page-
Howard Farran: This is your magazine?
Leona Meditz: This is ... Yes, I helped create this through Centers for Dental Medicine. When you look at the back page you'll everything in it comes from places like Johns Hopkins University, New England Journal of Medicine, even Time magazine knows about the oral systemic connection. EDNA knows about it. Everybody knows about it and yet we still have 70 percent of the population has active infectious periodontal disease. Why? If we know that it's a problem and it's because we don't have a system to create a solution.
I wanted to call this podcast the Secrets to a Clean Kiss because really that's what we want to do. We want to create. We want to give patients a clean kiss. If they have a clean kiss, they're going to have a healthy mouth. They're not going to double their chance of heart disease, diabetes, pre-term birth and all of those things. They're going to be healthy. On the one of the blogs that I put on Dental Town yesterday is an article that has this picture on it. This was from United Concordia. They not only know that getting rid of periodontal disease creates health, they've measured by how much money it saves. Per year, you can read that.
Howard Farran: I am. I listen to their CEO lecture. It's Bob their Dental Director. I think it's Bob Bran. He used to be the Executive Director of the American Dental Association for like a decade or two. Now he's with one of the biggest ones, I forgot what it was. I think it [Attenhour 00:13:45] or whatever but you know what the most ... Where it's going to start is you've got to follow the money. You know where the most expensive oral systemic health disease for American insurance companies?
Leona Meditz: I would guess pre-term birth.
Howard Farran: Pre-term birth. When you drop a one-pound frog, it's a million dollars.
Leona Meditz: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Howard Farran: They already have huge evidence saying "oh my god. If we could just-"
Leona Meditz: Medicaid pays for all of that.
Howard Farran: Get them to get their ... Yeah.
Leona Meditz: When you look at this, look at the hospital admissions. Look at this. For heart disease, 28 percent reduction in hospital admissions. Look at diabetes. 39 percent reduction in hospital admissions. Every time you go to the hospital, that's all cha ching, cha ching.
Howard Farran: Right.
Leona Meditz: This should be in dental offices. This should be in hygiene offices. They should be saying to the patient, this is not about saving your tooth. Yes, we want to do that. It's about health.
Howard Farran: Are you trying to say though that the mouth is connected to the body?
Leona Meditz: You know kind of the last time I looked in the mirror, it was.
Howard Farran: I know. It is.
Leona Meditz: I'm not about preaching the oral systemic connection. People like Ron Schefdore did that ahead of me. I am not about that. We have the groups, the AAOSH group that promotes the oral systemic connection.
Howard Farran: Chris Gammer.
Leona Meditz: Yes. I am about ... by the way took a lot of my stuff and bless him. I'm glad he did but I'm really-
Howard Farran: His dad started the AACD.
Leona Meditz: Oh really.
Howard Farran: Jack Gammer.
Leona Meditz: Oh say they had a system for that.
Howard Farran: Yeah. He had a system for the AACD and started the-
Leona Meditz: Bless him. He's done a wonderful thing for the profession. I love that. My is about now that you know about it, what do you do about it? There's five secrets about that. The first one is your protocol. When I'm talking about protocol I'm not talking about turning the laser on. We have plenty of groups. Your manufacturer will tell you that. The Academy of Laser Dentistry will teach your hygienist and you how to turn on a laser. We have plenty of people to do that. I'm talking about how do you communicate to the patients so that they say "yes," even though insurance doesn't cover it.
I have done that for ten years with over a hundred dentists and I guarantee that if a dentist ... you'll know that you need to look at my protocols or call me. That's really what I want you to do as a dentist.
Howard Farran: Which website would you want them to call? Clean Kiss?
Leona Meditz: It doesn't matter to me but Clean Kiss is the most popular one. Info@cleankiss.com or-
Howard Farran: I want to say one thing about what you said about lasers. I'm her in Phoenix for 30 years and there's a periodontist who's been on this show. Alan [Hawningman 00:16:48] and he started talking about LANAP that 20 years ago. All the locals threw him under the bus said "you're crazy. No research, no nothing." He just kept fighting and fighting and I just thought, "my god, that guy has got some thick skin." Now 20 years later every periodontist that I refer to within 10, 20 miles has got that LANAP.
Leona Meditz: Well, but still only a-
Howard Farran: Alan you're ahead of your time, buddy.
Leona Meditz: Absolutely. Innovators are ahead of their time and they take the crap. They're on the front lines.
Howard Farran: Yeah.
Leona Meditz: They take it.
Howard Farran: Especially dentists and physicians and lawyers.
Leona Meditz: Yup.
Howard Farran: When a dentist climes up the telephone pole, the first reaction is take a shot at him.
Leona Meditz: I don't know why we eat our own. I don't know why we do that but we do.
Howard Farran: We're in the ... You mention Jim and Naomi Roadie who started it was Smart Practice.
Leona Meditz: Mm-hmm (affirmative) with [Semantadontics 00:17:39] first.
Howard Farran: It was Semantadontics and Smart Practice. You know who Naomi Roadie was a hygienist. You know who her brother was? The dentist?
Leona Meditz: Omar Reid.
Howard Farran: Omar Reid.
Leona Meditz: I know him well. Yeah.
Howard Farran: Omar Reid. My god. Every time he said anything ten years ahead of his time.
Leona Meditz: Absolutely.
Howard Farran: They'd bad mouth him for ten years and say "oh, he's right." Well, dude, you threw him under a bus for a decade.
Leona Meditz: Then what's worse is they'll say "I always did know that would work."
Howard Farran: Omar told me something that was so funny and it all came true. He said, "yeah" when I started lecturing, he goes "jus remember when you start lecturing, you'll start reading people quoting you that you said this. Just remember, 80 percent of all the times you're quoted, you never said that." It's funny.
Leona Meditz: Or it's out of context.
Howard Farran: It's funny. I get quoted all the time and some of it is if you quote me, date me because say you said something in 87'. It's like well, dude, it's 2017, but anyway [crosstalk 00:18:28]
Leona Meditz: Right. Right exactly.
Howard Farran: Ryan we've got to get Omar over here on the show. He just lives the street.
Leona Meditz: The first secret is your protocol and this is how you know if you need help.
Howard Farran: This is on cleankiss.com
Leona Meditz: This is on cleankiss.com
Howard Farran: Love the name. I can't even believe you got that name. When did you get that name?
Leona Meditz: I got it ... When did I start doing it? I'm sorry, I've done a lot of things so it was in ... I started, it took me three years. I started in 2014.
Howard Farran: I can't believe you got that name.
Leona Meditz: Yeah.
Howard Farran: You can't get a domain name for ... I mean clean kiss.
Leona Meditz: There's nothing else around it. There's an organics place that is make-up but other than that there's nothing. The reason I got Clean Kiss is because I wanted to focus on what people wanted and I wanted to reach patients. I didn't want to call it some technical name that dentists relate to but patients don't understand because if patients come in and ask a dentist for something or they're using a product and they're doing well, the dentist is going to be, "turn around or pay attention." About 50 percent of my product have been business a year.
We've sold over a thousand, billed over a thousand orders. Those orders are kits. They're either one month or three-month kits. For each kit, the reason I did three-month kits is because why does the hygienist ... the hygienist brings the patient back every three months so my initial model is, the hygienist would say, "take this kit" and the patient pays for it. It's a $179 dollars and that's about a $1.83 a day. If you buy a Starbucks a day, you can afford to get this kit.
It's different in five different ways. First of all it's all organic. There's no chemicals and the more we look at fluoride, the more we look at chemicals, chlorhexidine, now we know that it causes heart attacks. It's the gold standard for getting rid of periodontal disease and it causes heart attacks. Male Clinic did a study on that. That's in the blog.
Howard Farran: That's in your blog. You've got a link to that study in the blog?
Leona Meditz: Mm-hmm (affirmative) I do. It is about what it does is it actually freezes the blood vessels so they can't expand and so it causes high blood pressure. It actually causes heart disease. Here that's the industry standard. I didn't want to use any chemicals, whether it be stabilized chlorine dioxide, which I used for years. It was the best we had at that time, but I wanted to make innovate something better, a next level. It has to work or else I'm not going to do it, but it can't be ... it has to be organic.
The other reason is because this is the pattern. Dentists calls me and says, "Leona, I want to take my hygienists up to the next level, my hygiene department to the next level." Great I guarantee you're going to make $10,000 a month more than whatever you're making now. I do an exam of their hygiene practice, which is free to anybody from Dental Town. It's $500 if you don't mention Dental Town. I do an examination of their hygiene re-care program. I've never come across a dentist, even someone with three hygienists, doing $30,000 a month in their 4000 codes, which is all their therapy. You know you need to revamp your hygiene department when you can't look at a patient's chart and answer these questions:
Number one. Does the patient have active infectious periodontal disease? Yes or no. Not a little bleeding, not pockets, do they have the bacteria that causes it, not just the symptoms of it? I teach them how to measure the bacteria and most people are probably familiar with the oral DNA test, but initially I use an enzyme test to measure because it costs $6 and it takes ten minutes. It tells them if they have the red bacteria.
If they have more than six pockets that are over three but no fives and they have red bacteria, they have active infectious periodontal disease whether they bleed or not because smokers don't bleed. You don't know. They can tell you they're not smoking.
Howard Farran: Can you get me that heart attack book I've reading? It's on the shelf.
Leona Meditz: Anyway, so that's the first question.
Howard Farran: I just want to say that one of the fastest selling books on the market today is "Beating the Heart Attack Gene."
Leona Meditz: I'd love to see that.
Howard Farran: He has an entire section that there's not just one thing that causes anything except for maybe a hepatitis virus causing hepatitis. He has an entire section about five different bacteria that are cause a big chunk of heart attacks and they're only found in gum disease.
Leona Meditz: That's right. Red bacteria.
Howard Farran: They're not coming up the back door. They're in the mouth. They're going down and they're getting in the pericardial sack and he has a whole section on that. There's the cardiologists are coming to many conclusions-
Leona Meditz: Right, in a Cleveland clinic has a program specifically for that and I have dentists in that area that are cross-referring with Cleveland Clinic doctors because the Cleveland Clinic doctors, the only thing they can do is put the patient on antibiotics. They can't do laser-assisted periodontal therapy. They can't do ozone therapy. They can't do trays, like a perio-protect kind of program. They can't do scaling and root planings. The only thing they can do is put the patient on systemic antibiotics and systemic antibiotics are not a good thing to put a patient on for a very long time. They need to know how to cross-refer with dentists and that's why I wrote the article with case studies, which was actually a Cleveland Clinic patient, which was case study on how they co-manage that patient through the physicians.
That's what HCP Wellment is about, but back to your hygiene protocol because this is where it starts. You have to know do they have the disease? Yes or no and to what degree? If they have five millimeter pockets, one six and a bunch of fours is that a class one, a two or a three or a four? What is it? We need to have our standards outlined so the hygienists know what to call it. They've been trained on it. Those standards are well-published but pull six charts, dentists that are watching this, pull six charts and see if your hygienist has put in there this patient has class three periodontal disease.
Howard Farran: Are they these protocols all on Cleankiss.com
Leona Meditz: No, they're not on cleankiss.com. You have to be a client to get them.
Howard Farran: How do they get them?
Leona Meditz: They call me at cleankiss.com and I will do an evaluation of their hygiene department and I will help them to know if I can guarantee them the $10,000 a month.
Howard Farran: What's number is it?
Leona Meditz: 12 classes will get them $10,000 a month for three years. I'll tell you what happens in three years.
Howard Farran: What number should they call?
Leona Meditz: They just go to info@cleankiss.com and they tell me, "let's talk. I'm available Wednesday afternoons." I'll call their office and make an appointment.
Howard Farran: Okay.
Leona Meditz: Okay, because the hardest thing that I have to do is get into dentists who want to talk to me. Tell your team, Leona is going to call and I said yes and I'm available Wednesday afternoon and I will make that happen, whatever it is. Friday morning, during lunchtime, I'll do it.
I'll rearrange my schedule to ... We'll find a time to talk. If they just say, "yeah, my protocols need to be revamped." I'll do this assessment of 50 of their periodontal patients for free fro them. They will be able to see this is what I'm doing right, this is what if I change what my projection will be and this is what will happen if I don't change. They will be able to see the numbers of exactly how much improvement they'll get in 12 weeks. That's the first step, okay.
The second thing they know they need protocols is if the patient is getting therapy but then they're not staying healthy. Health is not being sustained. The laser is great cleaning them up but guess what happens. They eat, drink and breath as soon as they leave that chair. What is keeping that bacteria at bay? This is a bacterial infection we must control bacteria. Not biofilms, not plaque, not decay, we start with the bacteria.
The problem. We go to the root cause of the problem. We measure it and we start with a scan for measuring the enzyme, the red bacteria and then once we determine that we have it, the next question we have to answer is is it going to the rest of my body?
The first question is do I have it and to what degree? That's the same question. The second question is has it gotten into my blood stream? The way that we measure that is we do a finger stick for an A1C and a CRP test. There are labs. It's $35. You get both an A1C and a CRP test with the same finger stick. I can train them, your team, the doctor's team how to do that. You don't need a special license. Anybody can do it if you're a dental assistant or a hygienist, you can do it. You don't have to go get re-certified for something because this is a finger stick. This isn't sticking the vein, out of the vein, a blood draw.
You send it into the lab and they will you back the results within two weeks. What we say to the patient is "we're going to find out, you have the disease. We know that. We know that you're a class two, periodontal disease. It's going to take six months to get rid of it. We want you to come back and make sure that it's not in your blood stream and we also need you to sign this release so that we can talk to your physician about this because you're on statin drugs or you're borderline diabetic and your physician might be deciding if you're going to be on insulin or not."
If you are not doing those kinds of things where it's documented in the chart, you need to do an analysis and let me see if we can work together. 12 weeks later you may be not only doing the better thing for the patient, you may be keeping somebody off of a blood pressure medicine if they can get rid of this. If the disease is ... If the bacteria is causing the inflammation, which is making the blood pressure high, then you get rid of that bacteria in the mouth first and then in the body. That's what these are for so this is about cleaning up the mouth. This is about cleaning up the body. Okay.
The mouthwash and the toothpaste kill the bacteria in the mouth. These work at the cellular level. They're anti-inflammatories and they oxygenate the cells. This makes the cells more resistant to the bacteria and reduces the inflammation that they already have. It's a one, two punch.
I had a client, actually it was a patient of a doctor, called me and was like "Leona, I fee like I'm fighting this from air, land and sea." She's getting her scaling and root planing and her laser and her home care all at once. First thing, look at your protocols. That's the first secret to a clean kiss. If you're not willing to change your protocol, you're going to be piecemealing everything I'm going to be talking about and you won't get the promised results. You change the piece of a system, you can't guarantee the results. You've got to do it the way it the way it's done.
Howard Farran: Do you have any periodontist product champions or anybody?
Leona Meditz: Periodontists. I had one periodontist and the periodontist told another colleague of mine, the product with Leona's protocol is it works. That's why I'm saying for three years because what happens is your patients get all cleaned up and they stay clean and I actually did research on it with 50 case studies through my clients and I presented it to the Academy of Laser Dentistry last year. What it showed is that once they did the bacteria ... once they did the protocol, first of all 42 percent from one practice was on medications already, 78 percent were on medications already of another practice. The one that was on the most medications actually did better. They controlled their bacteria, 66 percent change.
That's like double better if you turn the numbers around. 66 percent change whereas the ones that were not on medications yet, they changed it 22 percent. Why the difference? People that are on medication, they're taking the medication because they don't wan to get sick. People that aren't on medication think they're never going to get sick so they don't follow the protocol as well. The first secret is, analyze your protocols, make sure that you are communicating, diagnosing the patient is the first step. Giving them a prognosis. If you don't do anything, this is where you're going to be. I don't have a crystal ball, can't tell you if it's going to be a year, two years, five year, but this is the path you're on.
Then the third thing is to look at the whole body instead of just the mouth. The A1C measures glycated hemoglobin so we see how much sugar is left over in the mouth. It's not a fasting test, but it tells you how well that the body is processing sugar. A1C is recommended by the American Diabetes Association. Go to their website. You'll see. Everyone needs an A1C test so you're not out of your realm by as a dentist to offer that to your patients. They should have it anyway.
The CRP test measures C-reactive protein which is produced in the liver to fight inflammation. If I stub my toe into the wall and my big toe swelled, CRP would be going to be produced in the liver. CRP should be ... This is a 32 ounce bottle. It should be a pinch of it in a 32 inch bottle of blood. Less than one milligram per liter of blood is what healthy is. Three, nobody gets upset if it's three. That would be three times what health is. Okay.
When you get a CRP test it's not uncommon to see them have five milligrams per liter of blood. That's increasing their risk for heart disease by 500 percent. You can actually give a prognosis that says the path that you're on, you have a 500 percent increased risk of having a heart attack if we don't do some thing.
Now, periodontal disease may be only one of the things that we have to do. I'm not saying it's the magic bullet. I'm saying though that it causes inflammation in the body and we need to reduce any form of inflammation that we can.
Howard Farran: A lot of my physician friends say that you don't have any major diseases going on if you don't have elevated C-reactive protein. They see someone who is totally healthy, everything is fine, but they've got an elevated C-reactive protein, they keep looking.
Leona Meditz: Right.
Howard Farran: What's causing this?
Leona Meditz: Right.
Howard Farran: If they're looking at some old geezer and saying this guy is not doing too well but he's not inflamed, so everybody has made an association on inflammation is the beginning of al the disease processes.
Leona Meditz: Exactly and so how the dental team-
Howard Farran: The question is how much is that is coming out of your mouth?
Leona Meditz: Right. Exactly and we don't really now until we get rid of it. I'm not saying we can cure periodontal disease, nobody say Leona said she could cure periodontal disease. I'm saying you can put it in remission forever. It's sort of like a cold. You can't cure it but you can protect yourself from getting it.
Howard Farran: I can cure periodontal disease. I just take them to the crematory.
Leona Meditz: You pull their teeth all out.
Howard Farran: I put them the crematory and three hours later there is not periodontal disease. It's completely gone.
Leona Meditz: Pull their teeth and you'll eliminate it that way too. Let's talk about implantitus. Perioimplantitus.
Howard Farran: Huge problem because they are telling all these kids that implants only have a one to two percent failure rate but when you're in the field working and you see these implants been out there 10, 20, 30 years, 20 percent of them have perioimplantitus.
Leona Meditz: The National Institute of Health-
Howard Farran: I'll tell you another thing that's really hard with that is when grandpa comes in and he loves his implants, there's no pain. He can go to McDonald's and eat a cheeseburger.
Leona Meditz: Eat for the first time in five years.
Howard Farran: Then you're telling him it's failing and you want to spend all this money taking it out or redoing it and he's like "dude, there's no problem."
Leona Meditz: Right.
Howard Farran: The market is looking for things to treat perioimplantitus.
Leona Meditz: The National Institute of Health actually said that if you put an implant in a mouth that has gum disease, has periodontal disease, you have a 28.6 percent chance of that failing. If you put that same implant in a mouth that does periodontal free you have a 5.8 percent chance of it failing. I was-
Howard Farran: If you lose a tooth from decay, cavities, five percent, failure rate, you lose it from periodontal disease, 28 percent.
Leona Meditz: No, no. What they're saying is, the implant will fail. The implant will fail if you have it before you ... If you have periodontal disease and you go in for surgery, you have a 28 percent chance of that implant failing, just from periodontal disease. National Institute of Health they are not ... This is true information. I'm not making it up. Okay.
Howard Farran: Right.
Leona Meditz: If you go in healthy and get an implant, you lower it to 5 percent. Just when you're talking about what the implant companies are teaching young dentists. I'm telling you what the National Institute of Health has said about it.
I was at a round table at a major, I'm not going to say the name of it, but a major academy that trains dentists on how to place implants and they are going to be doing a position paper on how to avoid perioimplantitus. They're not talking about periodontal disease. They're talking about putting in bio-compatible implants. They're talking about make sure the angle is right. Make sure there is enough bone so the implant integrates with the bone properly. I'm sitting here listening to them talk about everything they're going to cover on this position paper that they're going to publish and I'm like who is talking about let's not put it in if they periodontal disease. Nobody said a word. I'm saying to myself "do I want to be invited back to this group or not?"
Howard Farran: It goes back to what I've complaining about for 30 years is that when you sit down and hear a bunch of dentists talk, they sound like a bunch of engineers. They talk about building this barn and all this. They talk like engineers. Then the barn fails every time by termites and the dentists who are biologists. Look at the amount i'm filling. It lasted 38 years because it was antibacterial. Now they put it an air of plastic, they last six and a half years. Then another thing I wanted to get to on this is it doesn't matter what dentists think anyway, it matters a lot what the market thinks and the biggest joke in dentistry is you tell a lady you have ten cavities and periodontal disease and her reply is so can we whiten my teeth today?
Leona Meditz: Yeah.
Howard Farran: Lots of people are driven to an invisiline for whiter, brighter, sexier teeth and they don't even understand all that pathogen stuff.
Leona Meditz: Here's my point. If you were to go into a physicians office and you had an infected broken leg, would the physician be more interested in setting the leg or be more interested in getting rid of the infection so you didn't lose the leg? Dentists have to switch their paradigm. Remember I said "my job is change management." The first thing that has to change is what's between your ears. Our we going to look at this as a bacterial infection that must be cleaned up before we do surgery?
A group has just joined me. It's a spine for replacement disc group. They have about 50,000 patients that belong to this support group. He has just because a Clean Kiss affiliate and what his doctors are doing is before they go in ... because now they're in the bone and they're intubating the patient. If they have periodontal disease and they intubate them, that's going directly into the body and now it's goin in the bone directly. Any doctor will tell you, we first look at the saliva, then we look at blood, then we look at tissue, then we look at the bone when we're talking about eradicating disease.
They're putting it directly in the bone by doing this disc surgery, or knee replacement or shoulder replacement or whatever they're doing. What this group is saying, get your teeth cleaned three weeks before your surgery. Go on Clean Kiss to keep you clean and make sure you get the nutraceuticals because there's two nutraceuticals. A nutraceutical by the way you know what a pharmaceutical is. It's a drug that targets a disease. Nutraceutical is nutrition that targets a disease. These are nutraceuticals.
One of them reduces inflammation, wouldn't that be nice to have when you're doing surgery. The other one supports bone. Wouldn't that be nice. What they found was the patient feels better because if they start two weeks before and they continue for three months. Then what they want to do is send them to a Clean Kiss dentist to be measured to make sure that they don't need periodontal therapy. Part of what I've done at the Clean Kiss website, you'll see the find a dentist. Part of what I do is I send people to the dentist.
Howard Farran: Can dentist put your Clean Kiss logo on their website?
Leona Meditz: Absolutely, but better than that I give them a page so that when they become distributors of Clean Kiss they buy it for wholesale, the patient buys it online and they buy it from their page, not my page, their page. Then I do auto-ship every three months they get a kit delivered to their home.
Howard Farran: For $179?
Leona Meditz: For $179.
Howard Farran: It's delivered to the patient's home?
Leona Meditz: Patients home. It's drop shipped to the patient. I bill the doctor. Well, basically I give the doctor the difference between wholesale and retail so that they've got residual income. If they have five patients that do auto-ship for one year, they will have $12,000 residual income. They see 100 dentists a month, you think they couldn't find five to go on auto-ship? I teach them how to do that. What happens is that, and I'm skipping around a little bit, the protocols is first. Protocols, what I mean is diagnosis, prognosis, treatment planning, treatment presentation. If you go through the 12-week program I guarantee you'll get a 50 percent acceptance of the cases presented and you will have $10,000 minimal increase in your 4000 codes and you'll have that every month for three years.
What happens in three years is my clients weren't real happy that all their patients were cleaned up, so they needed patients that were diseased and they weren't getting enough referred to them. Now they reach out to physicians to Natural Path. The other reason that I had to make this to be organic is that Natural Path won't even talk to you if it has a chemical in it. They won't even ... I tried. I tried to promote stabilized chlorine dioxide. They wouldn't even talk to me.
Howard Farran: I want to break in real quick. A lot of the dentists, when you say Natural Path, they're just done listening to that. Okay, she's a quack. Two arguments that it doesn't matter what you think [inaudible 00:44:37] the market is not in love with the pharmaceutical industry and when I talk to dentists, they're always against Natural Path, but then when you talk to them they're totally Natural Path. If a dentist has high blood pressure, he doesn't want to take a pill. He wants to lose weight, diet, exercise. Every dentist I know tries to heal everything naturally, and then they throw Natural Paths off a bridge.
I know dentists who did things like they advertised that they were off the grid so they don't leave a biocarbon footprint and they have natural-pathic ... Drive me an hour away from their office.
Leona Meditz: Yeah. There are different types of Natural Paths. All of them, but some Natural Paths it is woo woo. Some of them, and I'm not just talking about Chinese medicine, I'm talking about energy medicine. It might be true, but it's not been proven yet. That's not why I care about Natural Paths frankly. The reason naturopathic dentists, Natural Paths as a group, and we have Southwest College, Natural Pathic college is in Tempe. We have one of the top naturopathic colleges in the college right here in our back yard.
Howard Farran: Wow. Right, send me the link.
Leona Meditz: I'll send you also the president's name. I can get your doors in.
Howard Farran: Yeah, give me that. I had no idea.
Leona Meditz: He should actually be doing this. He should be doing your podcast to talk to dentists because there are ... naturopathic medicine is coming into its own. In fact, one of the good things and I'm not for Obamacare, one of the good things about Obamacare is that it made against the law to not pay insurance for naturopathic services if they were identical to physician services, other physician services.
If I need a blood work from my naturopath, and it was paid for by my insurance company, they couldn't discriminate against the Natural Path because one of the biggest problems is naturopathic medicine is typically not covered under insurance. People have to have savings accounts and those types of things, you know with them.
Here's why I care about Natural Paths. They understand inflammatory diseases. They get it. They are willing to co-manage inflammatory diseases with dentists. I don't care if you like them or not, they're going to send you patients who wills say, my natural path told me to come here and I will do anything you tell me to do to get rid of inflammation. That's why you care about Natural Paths. I will also teach you, the dentists who want to work, and the P for that by the way is a program. What the program, the final p, is how do we interact and co-manage patients with physicians. Any health care professional, whether it's a natural path, a physician, a chiropractor, a nurse practitioner, how do we co-manage our patients with them for the betterment of the patient, for better outcomes?
I'll give you a couple of things I teach my clients. This is some of the secrets of the Clean Kiss secrets. One of them is teaching a person in your office to not be afraid to pick of the phone and to demand a consult with the physician. It's against the law for them not to get you through to the physician or his nurse right away. What a dentist does is they call and the say "I'm Doctor such and such, patient such and such's dentist and I need to talk to the physician." The next thing out of that gatekeepers mouth is "well, let me take your name and number and I'll have him call you back." When you tell them you're a dentist, you are ... It's like saying I'm a car mechanic in the medical world. What you do is you call and say "I am Doctor such and such, we share a patient with doctor such and such. Her name is blah blah blah, date of birth, blah blah blah. I'm requesting a consult."
You get right through. Right through. There's the way you talk to the physician about a patient leads you to referrals. Friday I had a conversation with a physician, 37-year-old woman who had had a thyroidectomy and her endocrinologist could not pull her chart and tell me how much radiation this person had been exposed to. She's got a mouthful of decay. She would like to get implants. She's 37 years old, but we can't do them until we know how much radiation she's been exposed to. We can't even present options to this patient until we talk to that physician.
When we talk to the physician I say "well, when is her next appointment?" She doesn't have one. 50 percent of the time or more, the physician that's prescribing medication does not have a follow-up appointment with that patient. It's against the law, but it happens all the time. I don't know how they get medication without going back to their doctor. The drug companies have figured that out how to do that. I don't know how they do it, but they're doing it because they say "we don't have an appointment scheduled." I said "am I mistaken, did you not prescribe blah blah blah blah blah?" "oh, no we prescribed that." I said, "would you like me to call this patient and get an appointment for a follow-up with you?" "We would love that." Now, you're the physician's best friend.
When I say co-management I'm not just talking about dental co-management. I have to let you know that we're going to be doing this treatment on the patient. I'm talking about co-managing the patient. For example, when I said to them, "when was the last time they had an A1C test?" This is an endocrinologist. "Well, we actually haven't done that." I said, "would you like us to do an A1C test for you and send the results to you?" As a matter of course, we do it. "That would be great. Please send us the results."
Now you're forming a relationship with the doctor about that patient. You're not bringing cookies into the practice and saying please send me referrals. When I'm done with this patient I said to the endocrinologist "do you work with a diabetes educator?" "oh, yeah. That's through our hospital." "Would you like me to call the hospital and set up a webinar with the hospital to teach people how to better manage their diabetes by managing their periodontal disease?" "You can do that?" "yeah. You'll talk about the diabetes part. I'll talk about the periodontal disease part and we'll educate these patients." There's usually 50 in a room about how to manage ... And it's paid for by insurance so they come when they're diagnosed with diabetes. Every hospital has a diabetes education program.
Those dentists can go there and speak once a month and my dentist do and they get referrals from the physicians from the hospital for managing their periodontal disease. There's co-managing method is really based on the individual patient you share, not some global thing that you're going to do but that will lead you to the referrals. It does every time. That's the program.
When you become a Clean Kiss client, whether or not you become an HCP [welnut 00:52:59]client or a Medits Management client, if you just become a Clean Kiss client and to do that you purchase five three-month kits. It's really expensive Doctor Farran. It's $575. Now you're a Clean Kiss dentist. I will train you and your team for two hours for free and now you can be exclusive in your zip code to offer the program and you will be able to be on the "Find A Dentist." I will market you whenever I speak. I tell people, "go to find a dentist".
I get phone calls daily. "I don't have a dentist in my zip code. Can you help me?" "What's the name of the last dentist you saw?" "Doctor such and such. I'll call him and see if he's interested in being a Clean Kiss dentist." I'm finding patients who want to get their periodontal disease ... You see the difference? It's absolutely backwards.
Howard Farran: How are you training the office for two hours. You do that in person or a webinar?
Leona Meditz: I do a webinar.
Howard Farran: Do a webinar.
Leona Meditz: I got when I told you I was widowed for four years, but I was married for 37 years and I had to get off the road. It's one of the reasons I had to leave the Schuster Center is because my husband was ill and I was traveling over half of my life.
Howard Farran: Right.
Leona Meditz: They had something called Go To Meeting. KMB came around and that got me off an airplane. I do everything online on my channels.
Howard Farran: Then you remarried?
Leona Meditz: Then I remarried two years ago.
Howard Farran: Where did you find him?
Leona Meditz: On Christian Mingle.
Howard Farran: I told her I went on Christian Mingle but I couldn't find the men-seeking-men section. I must not check out the ... I want to ask you another thing. You got married again. You said you didn't like being single and lonely. People get married, the love the kissing, the affection, I love the name of this. So many people have told their dentist. "I have bad breathe." The dentist does his cleaning or whatever but they don't feel like it was drastic or anything. This would speak more to them. I think the name is amazing and I think it's a huge part, especially women. I think in my gut, ten percent of women are fearful that their breathe is bad and I just think the name of it ... I have to give you kudos on the name.
Leona Meditz: Thank you.
Howard Farran: I want to ask you one last thing.
Leona Meditz: Thank you. I woke up at three in the morning.
Howard Farran: I only got you for four more minutes. Not only 30 years ago when I was at dental school, the mouth was a connection to the body in consumer minds but I think it's also bizarre how so many dentists don't think ... they'll treat the wife every three months for periodontal disease and they've never seen her husband in ten years. It's like-
Leona Meditz: They're cross-infecting.
Howard Farran: When it's below the belt you know that STDs, gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, AIDS, all that, and you say to the dentist, how can you treat the mom when she's kissing the dad every night and every time I tell a patient that I say "one of the problems we have is we see you every three months. You still have periodontal disease. We've never seen your husband. Do you guys live in the same house? Do you kiss? Do you share utensils?" Her eyes like, "oh my god. Really. Is he? Does he-"
Leona Meditz: You can get periodontal disease from your dog, okay.
Howard Farran: Yeah. Decay came from cats. When they did the sequencing of [inaudible 00:56:35] it was only found in one other place, in the mouths of cats and they study the permutations per thousand and trace it back. They can pinpoint it. They say 15,000 years ago, somebody kissed a cat and the species jumped from mouth to human so then I don't know if I should love cats because they gave me my job or if I should hate cats.
Leona Meditz: Here's the thing about the final. These are the secrets of Clean Kiss secrets. The protocol. I've talked a lot about that. The products. The products have to work so organic is great but one of the things that the public thinks is that organic doesn't work. It's woo woo and it's expensive. I actually did a comparison study of the top ten organic dental care. The first thin is there is twice the botanicals in this for half the cost. I was able to get, and I searched for three years to be able to do this. I worked with a chemist who was also a surgeon and an MD and a surgeon from Belgium. I worked with him for three years to create this system. It's the first in the world that is a system of nutraceuticals and mouthwash toothpaste, you know the mouth as well as the body, all working together as a system.
You can buy nutraceuticals separate. You can buy mouthwash and toothpaste separate, but it's not a system. I guarantee the patients. They pay $179, this is what the hygienist says. "We'd like to have you be part of our case study to see how well ... We know the laser works. We've got you clean but we want to see how well we can keep your bacteria under control." We measured the bacteria when we started and it's an oral DNA test at that point. Then the 11 top bacteria and we measured it afterwards and this is what that looks like. Now we want to see if you can sustain it. You've had great results. I want you to use this as directed. This is what as directed means. You rinse and then brush, not backwards. You rinse and then brush.
The reason is, one of the secret ingredients in here is apple cider vinegar. There's also 13 essential oils. You read the four pages of my research and you'll understand why I put those together. There's also coconut oil in it. It's like oil and vinegar. The first thing you want to do is shake it up and then have them gargle first. The reason you do this first is because this is botanicals, botanical based, it has a PH of about 5.6. We want the PH of the mouth to be about 7 or greater because that help to ... the bacteria doesn't like it so it won't grow there. We want a basic mouth. When people wake up, their PH is typically five or lower so then you use this. The typical person will have a 7.6 PH. Why? Because the toothpaste has an 8.1 PH.
You gargle with this to kill the bacteria and the oils actually wraps ... it oxygenates and we know that oxygenation kills the bacteria. It doesn't like it. It also oxygenates the gums and it also gets the bacteria that's in the back of your throat that your toothbrush won't catch. Then you put some capful in your oral irrigator, whatever oral irrigator you're using, water flosser and you do that and that will get this under the gum line where you won't be able to swish it. That's going to wrap the oils wrap around the bacteria so you can spit it out.
Many patients are coming in saying, "well, what about coconut oil swishing?" First of all, who wants to sit there for 30 minutes with coconut oil in their mouths swishing it back and forth? It's disgusting. This uses a one two punch. It oxygenates to kill the bacteria and then it surrounds the bacteria so you can spit it out, but the PH is high or low actually. It's acidic. We don't want them to just rinse and go out the door.
Then what we do is we use the toothpaste. The toothpaste will bring that PH normal. This is also pretty strong tasting. It's not candy. It's medicine. It tastes better than Listerine. It doesn't burn because it doesn't have any alcohol in it but it's kind of a strong citrusy kind of taste. Okay.
Then you want to do the mild after that and you'll leave just really refreshed. It feels really good but this is important because it has the trace minerals in it so it fills in the grooves of the teeth to make them stronger. You want to do it in that order. The reason the spray was invented is because a lot of people because of their medications are on biotin too because they have dry mouth or they're on a CPAP. They have dry mouth. This re-moistens the mouth during the day and keeps the PH high towards that 7, 7.6 around in there. This is very mild tasting because I didn't want people running to the drinking fountain to rinse their mouth out. Sometime you spray a breathe spray and it's "ah." This is not. This is very mild but don't, it's still powerful. It will moisten and it will balance the PH in between brushings.
That's all part of the products. Having this, the mouthwash then the toothpaste, the breathe spray in between, these you take in the morning with breakfast and with dinner, twice a day, one pill twice a day. You have three months. You go back to your hygienist and what the hygienist says is "we'd like to have you on this case study. Now, if you agree to do that it means you will use it as directed and you will bring the bottles back to us so we can measure you've used." The reason for that is if they have leftover, they haven't used it as directed. We have measured this. We know this will last a month if you use it twice a day, an ounce a day this will last a month. We know that two of these last three months so if they have leftover product, it disqualifies them for the case study but it also disqualifies the patient for the money back guarantee.
If they're bringing empty bottles back, and yes I know some people can cheat and just throw this stuff out, but you're not telling them, you're just saying bring your bottles back so I can measure how much you've used for this case study. What have you done. You have said it's $179 but because you're going to play with the case study, if you use it as directed and it doesn't make improvements and I leave that up to the hygienist how much improvement they think is enough.
It may not cure them because maybe they haven't had their laser-assisted periodontal therapy or they're scaling in root playing. Maybe this is the only thing they've done, but if they feel like there is an improvement in pocket depths or bleeding or they measure the bacteria and that's improved then we count that as a success as a stand alone no matter what therapy other things they're doing. The important thing is by the patient feeling like they're part of a case study, guess what you're doing, you're changing their behavior because I have measured. I have a periodontal test, risk assessment on line and if patients go to that and take it, I give them free samples. When they do my risk assessment I know because I ask them. How many times do you brush your teeth? How many times do you floss? Do you water a water irrigator. Have you ever lost teeth other than wisdom teeth?
Why did I put that all together? I put that together so that my non-dental practices can let their patients take it online and now they know when to refer a patient to a dentist because they don't know. They don't have any idea whether they should send somebody or not. Let's say that a patient is going ... You are the doctor and the patient says "I'm going to a really good dentist. I love my dentist." "Well, does he measure for your bacteria?" "well, no." "we'll keep him for your crowns and bridges and all of that but go to Doctor such and such for your periodontal assessment."
Physicians are used to referring more than one specialty. They may send you to a bone specialist and somebody else and then whatever. It's no big deal. You're not stealing a patient from somebody, but when a patient starts using this and getting results, they're going to go back and start telling their crown and bridge dentist and now that dentist is going to get a line. The dentist they went to doesn't care because there is enough profit in periodontal therapy. There is more profit the way I teach them to do it in periodontal therapy than there is in crown and bridges. They don't care is if all they do is periodontal therapy and the patient goes somewhere else for everything else, they don't care because they've gotten their profit from their process.
We've got protocol. We've got products. We've got profits. That was very, very important. By doing it in three-month kits, there had to be enough profit for the dentist to do it. Most mouthwash companies that sell the dentist, it's a direct sell model. You're a dentist. I come from XYZ company. You buy it from the manufacturer. You buy it from me as the sales rep and that's it. The profit is from the manufacturer cost to your cost as the dentist. I'm developing an affiliate program because remember I may have Natural Paths on it. I may have diabetes educators or I have a physical therapist that is giving this to his patients.
It may not just be dentists so I have a three-tiered business model. I had to negotiate my fee with my manufacturer, and I'm not greedy, so I could make a fair profit. The dentist could make a fair profit and the affiliate that's selling it to their dentist could make a fair profit. I developed a three-tiered program. The pricing, every time one of these kits goes out the door, the dentist makes $50 and then they put them on auto-ship, they make $50 every three months as long as the patient is on it. Many of my dentists will say to the patient, "you go to auto-ship. We'll sell it for $165 instead of $179 and if you need laser in the future I'll do it for free for you as long as you're on your home care."
What does it cost a dentist to use a laser on a patient once they've been through therapy? What 15 minutes? Five minutes to do zap to number whatever. Okay. This way, the patient ... and then I throw in the shipping. The patient pays $165 instead of $179. They get free shipping and they get free laser from the dentist once they finish their therapy. That's how we get people on auto-ship.
Howard Farran: We went ten minutes over. I can feel your passion. Another great takeaway is that people think of marketing, they always think of a Facebook ad or a billboard or direct mail. Just get out there and impress the flesh with your physicians. Everyone getting sleep apnea is getting referrals from physicians. Pediatric dentists, they give out general dentists 20 years ago, they go right to the pediatricians, they want to talk to that pediatrician when that body comes out. They don't want to wait until the child is five.
I've had every pharmacist in my zip code in this house for dinner and you wouldn't believe how many people go up to the pharmacists say-
Leona Meditz: I had my first pharmacy group as an affiliate. Yeah.
Howard Farran: Yeah and people say is Ambesol best for a tooth ache? They go, "no, Howard Farran is. He's right over there by Safeway."
Leona Meditz: Right.
Howard Farran: They're like "is he good?" They're like "dude, I've been to his house for dinner." You say Natural Paths and I didn't know there was a big natural paths school but press the flesh. Get out there and run for mayor. Talk to pharmacists. I have gone into in the last six months I have gone into every emergency room within ten miles of my office and says ... Because eight percent of emergency room visits are tooth ache. I said and all they do is give them Vicodin and PMVK. Don't give them Vicodin and PMVK, give them this.
If you could walk into those emergency rooms and those girls are saying, "Howard. Dr. Farran. Give them cookies." Get out there and run for mayor. Everybody that's getting sleep apnea is getting referrals from physicians. They're getting referrals from physicians because they're going in and meeting the physicians. Anyway, my gosh, that must have been a long time. Was this all made in Maracopa?
Leona Meditz: It's made in Tempe.
Howard Farran: This is all made in Tempe?
Leona Meditz: It's an FDA registered lab. You don't have to be approved for nutraceuticals. If I was pharmaceuticals that would be different, but nutraceuticals you don't have to be approved but I, because I'm selling it to doctors and dentists, which are doctors, I wanted it to be made by and FDA-registered lab so if they made a mistake in the formula and somebody was allergic or whatever, I had that watchdog. I made sure it was an FDA registered lab.
Howard Farran: Man, I commend you. This looks like it was a ... you've been doing this how many years?
Leona Meditz: Since 1997.
Howard Farran: 20 years.
Leona Meditz: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Howard Farran: Thank you so much for coming on my show today and talking to everyone.
Leona Meditz: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Howard Farran: Oh, it was an honor and a privilege.
Leona Meditz: Same here.
Howard Farran: You went 12 minutes overtime so that's always a sign of a good show when you go into overtime.
Leona Meditz: Oh, okay.
Howard Farran: Alright.
Leona Meditz: Just means you'll cut more out.
Howard Farran: No, no it was great.