Over a decade ago, AADFA developed the industry leading concept of Complete Dento- Facial Health & Rejuvenation Education, which sets dental practitioners aside and positions them at the forefront of aesthetic medicine. This concept underpins everything that AADFA teaches and helps dental teams to ensure they have a clear, systemised approach to achieving optimal patient outcomes; avoiding complications, difficult conversations and disgruntled patients; and is centred around the core principle that cosmetic appearance comes second to achieving good health.

Healthcare providers have grown to realize the importance of adopting a more harmonious and less segmented approach to patient care in order to achieve the best results. For Dentists in Australia and New Zealand, this means it is no longer just about teeth and gums. Dentists now routinely perform cancer screenings, measure blood pressure, assess patients for sleep disorders and breathing difficulties, counsel patients on nutrition and quitting smoking and Dentists can even screen for various infectious diseases just by taking a simple mouth swab.

Care for facial skin health and the provision of facial rejuvenation therapies is a natural and long overdue progression for Dentists, who are now able to utilize their vast skills and experience in the facial region to provide patients with more comprehensive care and develop more successful practices. Australian and New New Zealand Dentists can now undergo comprehensive training to be able to offer everything from Botox an Dermal Filler injections, through to chemical peels, micro-needling and laser skin rejuvenation, as well as counseling patients on the best products to use at home.

Previously patients needed to consult several different practitioners in order to achieve the dento-facial health and aesthetic results they were looking for and this had the potential to result in a disjointed and unsatisfactory outcome. In addition to this, training for those traditionally delivering facial therapies (ie. Medical doctors and nurses), is very poor, with little regulation. This has created an industry rife with malpractice, poor results and dubious skills.

AADFA pioneered a new approach  - “Complete Dento-Facial Health & Rejuvenation” – an approach focused on comprehensive training and a holistic, preventative and conservative treatment philosophy. This has now set Dentists as the “Gold Standard” amongst health practitioners providing facial therapies.

With unparalleled levels of practical skill and anatomical knowledge of the facial region, Dentists are the very best people to be providing facial rejuvenation therapies to the public in a safe and hygenic clinical environment for both aesthetic and therapeutic needs. Dentists are the only practitioners able to ensure the establishment of a strong, healthy, supporting dentition which then blends harmoniously with an enhancement of the external soft tissues to achieve the best, safest and most natural overall results.

This logical approach to treatment has now been accepted as the best methodology by other specialists and healthcare regulators, yet AADFA trained Dentists are the only practitioners who are truly able to provide this sound approach – combining dental and facial treatments under the one roof, in the same appointment, making treatment less painful, more convenient and more comprehensive.

In essence, AADFA’s teachings focus on improving the health of the intra and extra-oral tissues first, using a conservative, minimal approach, which then leads to a natural and appealing aesthetic improvement, rather than simply delivering basic injections and therapies with a “cosmetic” focus to unhealthy tissues, which results in an unnatural and “overdone” outcome, with high rates of patient dissatisfaction and complication. This approach is best understood and implemented by thinking in terms of the different layers of the face – we need to ensure we improve tissue health across all layers, for the overall aesthetic outcome to be optimal. While the patient’s goal may be an aesthetic improvement, we achieve this by making our goal, as Health Professionals, the restoration, optimisation and maintenance of good health.

With over 10000 Dental Practitioners across Australia, New Zealand and Asia having successfully incorporated extra-oral facial therapies into their practice to provide comprehensive patient care, there is now a general acceptance that these skin services fall firmly within the remit of the dental profession.  Moreover, it has reached the point where, if you’re a Dental Practitioner who fails to examine and consider the skin and other prominent facial structures adjacent to the oral cavity, on each and every patient, it would be difficult to claim you truly obtained fully informed consent; for procedures ranging from orthodontics and gummy smile, through to TMD and anterior aesthetic cases; without any consideration or discussion having taken place around the impact of and on, the extra-oral facial features and how structures adjacent to the teeth and gums interplay with what is done intra-orally.

If you don’t have the tools in your armamentarium to successfully address skin, facial deterioration and ill-health, just as you would the teeth and gums, then it would be likely that you are falling behind your colleagues and below the standard of modern day Dentistry, as the mouth, teeth and jaws can no longer be treated as if they are isolated from the rest of the face.  Considering this, the profession really has reached a point where, as a dental practitioner, you either stick to cleans, root canals and simple restorations, or you understand the entire dento-facial complex and factor all aspects in to your more advanced restorative, orthodontic and aesthetic treatment plans.  By simply offering intra-oral dentistry, especially advanced procedures, you run the very real risk of being caught out, failing to provide comprehensive care.

Because the typical pattern of dento-facial ageing, deterioration and poor aesthetics is the result of the dynamic, multi-factorial and cumulative effects of various assaults, as well as predictable anatomical/histological changes, in a range of different tissues over time, there is no single, “magic bullet” treatment to restore health, vitality and aesthetics to the facial region. Instead, Dental Practitioners must utilise a variety of proven techniques, applied intra- and extra-orally, that are specifically designed to target each individual layer of the face – different treatments, targeting different structures and different aspects of the ageing/deterioration process. Just as it is no longer enough to simply treat the teeth, it’s not enough to just offer Botox and Dermal Filler alone, so this necessitates training in a series of therapies rather than just one or two.

These techniques are learnt individually along AADFA's  pathway of structured, continuous learning, and achieve incredible results when combined to form a multi-pronged, comprehensive and holistic dento-facial treatment plan.  Dental Practitioners are really the only healthcare providers who can offer such comprehensive dento-facial care, as they are the only ones who can set the foundations intra-orally, before further enhancing the extra-oral tissues.

Learn what an AADFA Trained Dentist can do ...