How At-Home Oral Care and Professional, In-Office Care Help Your Oral Health

You’ve probably have going to the dentist as long as you can remember as a little kid. Like some patients, maybe the busyness of life or the fact that not you’re an adult, you aren’t forced to see the dentist.Maybe at one point your oral hygiene was important to you. As a kid, you did all you could to not get a cavity and get that prize reward. As you aged, however, the health of your teeth and gums has taken a back seat.You may think that you don’t need to see the dentist. After all, your mouth looks and feels great, except for the minor tooth discoloration.Here are reasons why both at-home oral care and regular visits to the dentist office are important in maintaining great oral health:At-Home Oral CareMost of your oral health is your responsibility. You only go to the dentist twice a year (or more if you have a dental issue). That means all the other days, you’re the only one to clean your teeth and gums and spot any irregularities.Brushing your teeth and flossing take only a few minutes every day. Flossing and brushing your teeth on your schedule and in the privacy of your own home can’t get any easier.Proper, at-home oral hygiene does mean more than just brushing for a couple seconds and flossing between a few teeth. You’ll need to start off with a soft-bristled toothbrush that is no more than three months old and fluoride toothpaste. Brushing for two minutes, twice a day and flossing on both sides of each tooth will dramatically lower your risk of tooth decay and gum disease.What happens when you’re at work and can’t brush your teeth or floss? Swishing with water, in fact drinking a lot of water is a great way to clean out your mouth after eating or drinking beverages that can stain the teeth in between brushing.Oral health conditions such as tooth decay and gum disease happen gradually. Skipping just one day of brushing or flossing can give cavity-, gum disease-, bad breath-causing plaque a foothold. This makes at-home oral care vitally important.If you notice something doesn’t look or feel right in your mouth, you’re the only one who will notice. If the condition is severe, a visit to the dentist office may be in order.You’re the only one who can care for and monitor the health of your mouth day in and day out which plays a big role in your oral health.Regular Office Visits Even if you already do all the abovementioned things as part of your at-home oral hygiene routine, regular visits to the dental office are still necessary. Why?Those dental conditions or irregularities you found that are causing severe, chronic discomfort will be best diagnosed by a trained dental professional. A dentist will also know the best course of treatment to take.Dental offices will also have more tools and equipment than what you have at home, including specialized tartar scrapers, powerful toothbrushes, and more concentrated toothpaste. The operation of such equipment by the hygienist will also allow for a deeper and more though cleaning of hard-to-reach places. Dentists can also deep clean your gums using special tools and procedures and ward off possible gum disease.Your dentist, in short can offer the best, most effective treatment of dental issues and provide a deeper cleaning than what you can do at home.Good at-home dental hygiene won’t ensure good dental health no matter how white and healthy your teeth look. Only relying on the occasional dental office visit and the dentist recommendations also won’t bring about healthy teeth and gums.Both a solid at-home dental hygiene regimen and regular visits to the dentist office are needed to ensure the best care of your oral health.

Grandad, What’s a Business?

Grandad, what’s a business? This is a simple question but like many simple questions the answer is a bit more complicated than you might expect. Complicated but easy to understand if you let Grandad explain.

Quite simply, a business is a group of people who are joined together to sell something to bring in money, referred to as “income”.

A business can be very small, even just one person. This small business can have a legal form or the person can just consider himself (or herself) to be “self-employed”. Even a one-man business must bring in enough money to pay for his living costs. Otherwise he will need to get a job in another business or live on social security paid out by the government and that is no fun at all.

The size of business that we meet most often is as small as 2 or 3 up to as many as several hundred. These companies are often referred to as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). They normally have a legal status such as “partnership” or “limited company”.

The big beasts in the business jungle can be very large indeed, often with thousands of employees and many millions of pounds income and are usually “Public Limited Companies” (PLCs). All these businesses are important and Grandad will tell you more about all these businesses in the next few days.

Let me tell you now about the money earned by a business, called “income”. This money must be enough to cover what are called costs or “expenditure”. Costs are all the expenses that the business incurs: the materials the business might have bought, rents, wages and money paid to other people. Costs can include a whole lot of other things such as computer cost, telephone bills, insurance, heating, transport etc.

The idea of a business is that income should be more than expenditure, If income is greater than expenditure, the difference is called a “profit”. If income is less than expenditure then the business is said to make a “loss”.

Making a loss is a BAD THING. If losses continue then the business cannot carry on and is said to be bankrupt. The business has no money to pay its bills.

Profit therefore must be a GOOD THING. Not everyone agrees but Grandad will explain as we go on why profit is a VERY GOOD THING.

There is an in-between result which is called “break-even”, which is not a loss and not a profit. Normally a business can survive in a break-even state but it brings problems that we can talk about later.

Grandad has not yet mentioned the greatest contribution that businesses make to all our lives – TAXATION. Businesses are a rich source of TAX, which our government needs to pay for schools, the National Health Service, roads, police, firemen, the Army, Navy and Air Force, old age pensions etc. Our politicians have great ideas on how to spend money but they have no money to spend unless businesses create TAX.

There is a tax called CORPORATION TAX which is charged as a percentage of the profit the business makes. However businesses create tax for the government in many other ways. Everyone who gets wages or a salary from a business pays INCOME TAX and the business pay NATIONAL INSURANCE for each person working for the business. No business, no wages, no income tax, no national insurance. Businesses charge VAT (Value added tax) on most things they sell They pay what they collect (less what VAT they have paid to other businesses) to the government. Owners of a business can take money out of the business in the form of what are called “dividends”: INCOME TAX is paid as a percentage of these dividends. Finally owners can sell a business to somebody else and if they do, they pay CAPITAL GAINS TAX on the sale. If a business buys insurance, it pays INSURANCE TAX. If it buys goods from abroad, it often has to pay TARIFFS to the government.

Corporation Tax, Income Tax, National Insurance, Value Added Tax, Tax on Dividends, Tariffs, Capital Gains Tax all help in paying for things we value such as schools, police, defence and the National Health Service. Without these taxes the government would not have enough money to pay for these things. By the way, businesses also pay COUNCIL TAX which pays for local services such as street cleaning, parks, playgrounds and many other things we take for granted.

Of course, businesses are not created and operated in order to pay taxes. The business is created to make money for the owners and to pay wages for the people working in the business. They will work hard in the business for their own benefit. the tax paid out being an unintended benefit to the rest of us. This raises all sorts of interesting questions that Grandad will talk about another day.

Resilient Businesses Move Their People To The Cloud

Every year, as the Atlantic hurricane season approaches many businesses have a nagging realization that they are at risk due to a catastrophic “Black Swan ” event. Black Swan events are a constant source of risk in states like Florida where many communities are subject to disruption due to coastal storms. This risk is particularly acute for businesses that depend on the storage of on-line data if there is a chance their critical data could become lost or corrupted. But the threat from Black Swan events isn’t limited to Florida, nor is it limited to large scale disruptive events like hurricanes.The black swan theory or theory of black swan events describes a disruptive event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. The term is based on an ancient saying which presumed black swans did not exist, but the saying was rewritten after black swans were discovered in the wild. Consider the following scenario…

“We tend to think of disasters in terms of the attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina, or other mega events. Sometimes, however, less notable events occur that can have a catastrophic effect on a business. In February 1981, an electrical fire in the basement of the State Office Building in Binghamton, New York, spread throughout the basement of the building setting fire to a transformer containing over a thousand gallons of toxin-laden oil. Originally thought to be PCBs, the toxins were soon determined to contain dioxin and dibenzofuran, two of the most dangerous chemicals ever created. The fire was smoky and quickly filled the 18-story building with smoke. As the transformer burned, the soot entered the buildings ventilation shafts and quickly spread toxic soot throughout the building. The building was so badly contaminated that it took 13 years and over $47 million to clean before the building could be reentered or used. Because of the nature of the fire, the building and its contents, including all paper records, computers, and personal effects of the people who worked there, were not recoverable. This type of event would be irrecoverable for many businesses.” – Operations Due Diligence, Published by McGraw Hill

What affect would a catastrophic hurricane that affected an entire region or a localized disruptive event like a fire have on the operation of your business? Could you survive that kind of interruption or loss? As the dependence on on-line data has grown in virtually every type of business, so has the risk that loss of their data could disrupt the operation of the business and even result in its complete failure. In response to these threats, there has been an evolution in the approaches used to mitigate these risks as the volume of on-line data has continued to grow. Originally, the concept of Disaster Recovery (DR) emerged as a mitigation strategy that focused on the recovery of critical data after a disruptive event by giving the business the ability to restore disrupted IT operations.

Disaster Recovery (DR) involves a set of policies and procedures that enable the restoration of critical business data and allows the IT infrastructure to be restored to a prior state. DR was originally seen as the domain of the IT department who were given responsibility for mitigating the risk. To minimize the risk, system backups were scheduled frequently and aggressive DR plans that included server cold start procedures and data backups were implemented.

The goal was to restore the infrastructure to the last point where the data had been backed up (at the time, typically on tape). The acceptable DR practices at the time allowed the IT system to be rebooted when the facility power was finally restored… Unless it was in a flood zone or the off-site backup storage facility had also been impacted. In either case, the operation of the facility could potentially be disrupted for some period of time and the data restoration was also potentially at risk depending on where backups were stored.

Now let’s roll the calendar ahead… As technology evolved so did the Disaster Recovery strategies, which lead to new concepts that evolved to the requirements for a Business Continuity solution as a means of mitigating risk. Still seen as the domain of IT, as technology moved towards solutions like shadow servers, distributed data locations and high speed bulk data transmission with hyper connectivity. Data no longer had to be “recovered”, it just had to be connected in distributed locations where it could be remotely accessed. Business Continuity mitigated the risk of data loss and allowed a business to recover much more quickly and efficiently from a Black Swan event because its servers never went completely down.

Business Continuity originally encompassed planning and preparation to ensure that an organization’s IT infrastructure remained intact enabling the business to efficiently recover to an operational state within a reasonably short period following a Black Swan event. Technology today has evolved towards cloud solutions that put both the data and the applications into remote “cloud” locations so it would seem the IT responsibility for mitigating the risk of on-line data loss or corruption has been solved. With highly connected, fully distributed solutions, some people feel the need for business continuity may be fading in criticality. Nothing could be further from the truth…

The fact is the risk was never solely in the loss of the data but the loss of the businesses ability to operate. There are businesses that cannot tolerate any disruption to their operations. These include healthcare, insurance, and communications companies, critical logistic suppliers, transportation providers and local governments. It is during Black Swan events that the services and products these businesses provide may be most needed. The requirements of other, less critical businesses, whose operations could be interrupted for days or even weeks, but who might face a significant financial risk, may also make their continued operation a matter of corporate survival.

Today’s technology has completely abstracted business processing and data from the user by moving critical IT infrastructures into the cloud. Cloud technology enables users to work from remote locations, but use of the cloud doesn’t fully mitigate operational risk. It means people have now replaced computers as the critical path to continued operations. The operation of the business is more likely to be interrupted because key personnel aren’t prepared to sustain operations during a Black Swan event. They don’t have a facility that has been proactively planned to support operations during disruptive events that could last for hours, days or weeks. Particularly in areas like Florida, where large natural disasters such as hurricanes can disrupt services to entire communities, resilient businesses need to prepare in advance for sustained operations during a disruptive event. The ability of a business to continue its operations during times of distress are a measure of the businesses resiliency.

Business Resiliency: takes business continuity to another level because it makes it the domain of operations management rather than leaving it solely as the domain of the IT Department. When planning for disaster recovery or business continuity the critical link is now the people who are needed to operate critical systems remotely. Yes, there are occasions where staff can work from home or from remote facilities the business may operate, however, this is not always a satisfactory answer and even when it is, businesses often find themselves scrambling to play catch up, trying to figure out who does what and “how can we get it done under these circumstances” situations. During Black Swan events including regional disruptions like hurricanes or local disruptions such as fires, many of the people the business relies on may not have power, internet or even a phone needed to enable them to work from home. Because you can’t put people in the cloud, Business Resiliency requires planning, training and practice so that your staff knows how and when to mobilize.

Resilient businesses integrate Black Swan response into their continuing operations so that, when they are needed, at a time when the business and the people are under stress, everyone knows how to respond efficiently and effectively and where to go to provide that response. Business resiliency requires a dedicated facility that has been hardened to withstand Black Swan events and has been designed to provide the support services the people and the IT infrastructure will both need. Business resiliency requires proactive planning and the integration of operating procedures into the businesses standard operating plans to include remote operations by trained critical staff who have been mobilized to respond during disruptive events and it requires proactive practice to ensure that, when remote operations are needed, the people are ready.