Dr. Russell Roderick Values Serving Patients and the Community

I think I started off, you know, software engineering and maybe business and then medicine in general, but I think I like the combination of being able to use my mind as well as my hands. And just growing up, had a lot of family members and friends that were in dentistry and a lot of them were in medicine too, and the dentists just seemed to have a more balanced life. And that’s what I wanted, because I knew I wanted a family and all that stuff.

And so, yeah, I mean, the big part, but the reward too, now that I’ve got into it for almost 30 years, is just the life-changing things you can do in dentistry that most people don’t realize as far as just changing their outlook on their smile, changing their outlook on how they bite, changing their outlook on how, you know, their gums feel. Simple things like that and how that can affect the rest of their body that we know now. I did undergrad at Augustana, did dental school at Southern Illinois, did my residency at University of Missouri, and then rather than going back home right away, decided to come out here, give Arizona and the weather and all that and golfing and all those kind of things a chance, and haven’t left since, so that’s 30 years ago.

But since getting out of school, I was very fortunate. My younger years, I have thousands and thousands of continued education hours, particularly geared toward cosmetic dentistry, PacLife, numerous other big names that won’t mean necessarily anything to other people, but big names in the industry that teach cosmetic dentistry, rehabilitation dentistry, and then a lot of continued education on how the mouth is the gateway to the rest of the body and how that affects us there, much more than the vast majority. I mean, I’ve got my fellow in Academy General Dentistry working toward a fellow in the Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry, which a very small percentage have those things.

The Fellowship of Academy of General Dentistry, that’s like 5% or less, and I would say, I don’t know exact number, but I know the Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry, that’s probably 2% or less that have some of those things in their credentialing or just background, and it’s each of those is thousands of hours. You have to do some sort of hands-on test, some sort of written exam for all that, but all beyond school and beyond, you know, dental school or even residency that, again, some do, but the vast majority don’t have those kind of credentials. The better your bite, the longer it’s going to last and the longer it’s going to not wear or tear or break or chip or crack, and two, just how important the gums are to the rest of the body, because gum disease is super prevalent, 75 to 90 percent, depending on what study you want to look at, of adults over 30 have some form of it in some place in their mouth, but it’s probably one of the most undertreated diseases, along with heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes, and if not treated, that’s the number one reason people lose their teeth, but when treated, it decreases all those risks for all those other things I just mentioned, because the bloodstream carries that bacteria everywhere, and so we know now how many connections there are, and there’s multiple more than just those I mentioned of the mouth being the gateway, both intestinally or through your gut or your stomach, but also through your bloodstream on how that can help everything else.