Saoirse O’Toole is a clinical researcher and the dental representative on the MOUTHY curatorial team. She wanted to be a dentist since the age of 12, when her Dad (a doctor himself) told her never to become a doctor. Saoirse qualified at Dublin Dental University Hospital at Trinity College Dublin, and after five happy years in general dental practice, she started a PhD at King’s College London looking at how acids in the diet affect our teeth. Here Saoirse talks about her dental research and her role on the curatorial team.

Often when we think about the mouth we think about what we show on the outside. We are conscious about our smile, our breath or whether we have something stuck in our teeth. As a dentist, I’m less interested in the mouth as a decorative organ and more conscious about the processes and mechanisms on the inside. However, with the mouth, you can never fully separate the “inside” from the “outside”. The examination of the patient starts when they walk in the door: advanced signs of arthritis may indicate they need help brushing their teeth and are at risk of gum disease. The connections between the mouth and the rest of the body are wide-reaching; a patient’s medical history may tell me they are on medications which cause dry mouth, so I start the examination aware that they may be at increased risk for dental caries.

I’m currently finishing my PhD, which is an investigation into the relationship between the timing of dietary acid intake, tooth brushing and acid damage to the teeth. I’ve been investigating topics such as comparing the damage done to teeth when fruit is eaten outside of mealtimes as opposed to part of a meal and whether you should brush your teeth before or after breakfast. At the moment I split my time between, seeing research patients, analysing their data back in the lab and teaching undergrads clinical dentistry. I use techniques such as laser profilometry and 3D superimposition to allow me to analyse how the surfaces of teeth wear away over time. The video shows how we can use these techniques to measure exact amounts of tooth wear between dental visits by superimposing scans taken of teeth at separate visits.

Being on a curatorial team has been a novel experience for me and has enabled me to explore the mouth very differently to the ways in which I investigate it in my research and dental practice. I have enjoyed discovering how other people, especially non-dentists, view the mouth. A piece that I am particularly excited about is Teeth show, a work that explores the mouth from a dental patient point of view through a series of performances developed by performance artist Natasha Davis in collaboration with members of the King's College Dental Institute.

Exploring the mouth and dentistry from this perspective is particularly intersting to me as it ties into a strand of my research which looks at whether the information a health professional provides can bring about behavioural change. In order to induce behavioural change you need to see things from the point of view of a patient. Working on MOUTHY I have been able to connect artists with King’s College London Dental Institute academics in order to do this, and watched results unfold that I could never have dreamt of. MOUTHY zooms right into the minutiae of saliva or tooth enamel and pans back out to look at perception, language and self-expression, reminding me of the similar relationship between academic dental research and the practical impact that this can have on real people’s oral health and day-to-day lives.

For me, MOUTHY demonstrates how the oral cavity it is a reflection of our personalities, our diets and most importantly our general health. Bringing the mouth alive in such diverse ways, I'm really hopeful that MOUTHY will leave people with a lot more information and enthusiasm about how to look after and appreciate this important gateway.

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June 24, 2016

MOUTHY: A dentist's perspective