As 2024 winds down, we’re grateful for our wonderful patients and the smiles you share with us all year long. This season is all about joy, connection, and of course — staying healthy!

In this issue, we’re thrilled to introduce Kari, our New Patient Coordinator, and our beloved Front Desk Team Lead, Abbey, who bravely shared her story about the ischemic stroke she suffered in August. Plus, we’ll highlight Handwashing Awareness — because great hygiene supports great smiles.

We’re also giving you a sneak peek at some exciting changes coming to our practice in 2025.

Wishing you and your family a joyful, healthy holiday season and a bright new year ahead!

In This Issue:

• Reflecting on 2024 and Looking Forward to 2025
• Abbey’s Stroke of Insight
• The Connection Between Nicotine Use, Stroke, and Dental Health
• Introducing Kari, Our New Patient Coordinator
• Thank You to Our Amazing Staff
• Wishing You Joy, Health, and Smiles This Holiday Season!
• Please Leave us a Review!

Reflecting on 2024 and Looking Forward to 2025

An end-of-year letter by Dr. Levy and his wife Lena Rotenberg, Vice-President of Operations and Practice Manager

Dear Patients:

We have MUCH to be grateful for as 2024 closes. 

First and foremost, we’re grateful for your trust. Thank you again for voting us the Best of the Best Dental Practice in Frederick for the third year in a row. Thank you for your glowing reviews – we read every one on Google and Facebook – and for answering our post-appointment surveys. Thank you for your honesty in letting us know how we’re doing.

We feel privileged to be able to continue to serve the Frederick area by offering high quality, individualized, and comprehensive dental care. We are proud to consider our business model “old-fashioned.” We still pick up the phone in the middle of the night for a dental emergency. We continue to prioritize providing only the treatment that our patients really need; there are no production quotas that anyone needs to meet. We intend to have humans – not AI bots – working at our front desk for the foreseeable future. We love the fact that our humans at our front desk and treatment rooms know our patients, and that everyone develops longstanding relationships.

We’re grateful to have the best dental team in Frederick! We feel blessed that everyone in our team is in good health, including Abbey (read her story below). Only one team member left us this year, dental assistant Ana. Licensed as a dentist in Bolivia, she is now at the University of Mississippi Dental School studying to qualify for her US dental license. Finally, we added two team members! Hygienist Donna returned from Florida and rejoined our practice. Assistant Kat, who is fluent in Spanish, took over Ana’s position.

We’re grateful to continue to treat patients with special needs, many of whom came to us referred by other dental offices as far away as Annapolis, because they were “too difficult to treat.” When patients couldn’t be treated in our office, Dr. Levy, Annette and Kristy were able to  treat them in three different hospitals, in Frederick, Hagerstown and Baltimore. 

We’re grateful to have been able to serve our community, by providing pro bono dental care during Give Kids a Smile Day and to indigent patients with life-threatening dental infections at Frederick Health Hospital. The community we serve has even expanded over the last two years: The educational videos we’ve been creating are being viewed on our YouTube channel  by thousands of people worldwide.

We will not compromise the quality of care we offer you, nor the employee benefits we offer to our team. So in 2025 we’ll be making some changes, to ensure that we can maintain our standard of care for many years to come.

• Patient care begins in the waiting room. You may have noticed our new chairs, a brighter atmosphere, and our logo on the wall. Soon a new carpet will be installed, as well as window blinds to ensure your privacy.

• New patients will enjoy a smoother onboarding with Kari, our New Patient coordinator (article below).

• We’ll be replacing our patient communication, medical forms, and appointment reminder system with a better one in January. We’ll keep you posted and apologize in advance for possible inconveniences – you may receive more than one email or text message from us as we test the new system.

• Soon we’ll be upgrading our electronic billing system. You’ll receive links to pay online via text and/or email (your choice). If you pay your balance with a credit card there will be a surcharge of 3% (the fees we’re charged). However, if you pay with a debit card, with ACH, or by check, there will be no surcharge. 

• We will continue to mail paper statements to ensure HIPAA compliance, but we expect to receive payment within 30 days. After that the account will incur a 1.5% monthly late payment fee.
  
• Our financial policy will be updated effective January 1, 2025. We’ll continue to offer self-pay patients over 65 a Senior Citizen Courtesy Discount of 5%. For self-pay patients to qualify for a cash discount, more restrictions will apply. (Note, our Dental Health Club’s discounts are far more generous.)

• Our updated financial policy also clarifies how we deal with commercial insurances both in-network and out-of-network (OON). As we’ve already communicated to our Carefirst patients, we’ll be OON with Carefirst effective January 1, 2025. (What OON means is that you as an OON patient can continue to come to us and that we will continue to file your insurance claims. You will still receive insurance benefits, but depending on the plan your employer has implemented, things may work a bit differently. Our front desk coordinators will be happy to work with you to figure out how this change will affect you personally, and to discuss alternatives.)
  
• Our website will be updated, starting with new photos and updated bios of all our team members.
  
• We’ll be more appreciative of patients who recommend us to friends who become our patients. We’ve been remiss with that. Belated thanks is due to you, if one of the almost 500 new patients who joined our practice in 2024 did so because you sent them our way! 

In 2025 we’ll celebrate Dr. Levy’s 45th year practicing in Frederick! If multiple generations of your family are, or have been, patients in our practice, we would love to hear from you. Please email 2025@drhlevyassoc.com if you’d like to share a family photo or a message celebrating this milestone.

As we enter the new year, we look forward to more shared successes, growth, and, of course, more healthy smiles in our treatment rooms! Thank you to each and every one of you, for your kindness and your appreciation. 

Abbey’s Stroke of Insight

Interview and article by Lena Rotenberg

If you’re our patient it’s very likely that you’ve talked with Abbey Mason face-to-face or over the phone. She has worked with us as a front desk coordinator since early 2002, when her son Peyton was an infant. Known to her friends and family as “Gabby Abbey,” she is an active 54-year-old woman who loves life, loves new projects crafting and baking, and loves engaging with others and exchanging stories. 

Abbey’s gift of gab came to a grinding halt on August 10, 2024, while she and her family were attending a graduation party. She reports that she started to feel numb and that her head was atypically empty of thoughts; that she saw people around her table trying to talk with her, but that she couldn’t engage; that she felt that something was very wrong. Peyton, now 23 years old, asked her if she was OK. He was not pleased with what he saw, and immediately rushed her to Urgent Care. 

Urgent Care sent them straight to Frederick Health Hospital, who immediately triaged Abbey and sent her to the ER. There, a doctor experienced in strokes was called to examine her. Abbey couldn’t respond to questions such as “what year is it,” and was quickly admitted as a patient. A battery of tests was conducted. Her blood pressure (BP) was around 190/100. An MRI revealed that she’d suffered an ischemic stroke. 

She felt numb and terrified upon hearing the diagnosis. How could that be, at her age? She ate healthy. She exercised. She didn’t drink alcohol. She was not overweight. 

Tests conducted at the hospital  eliminated several possible causes, such as diabetes and high cholesterol. A doctor asked Abbey if she smoked cigarettes, and she said “no.” (She had smoked them for about 20 years, then 15 years ago transitioned to vaping.) When the doctor asked her if she vaped, she remembers him saying, “Yes, of course. Nicotine.”

After two days in the hospital she was dismissed. She was ordered to stop vaping, to rest and not to drive. She subsequently visited a neurologist, who ordered tests for obstructive sleep apnea (ruled out as a cause) and for atrial fibrillation (AFib). 

Abbey’s husband Steve arranged for speech therapy with Sandi Lancaster right away, and drove her from Knoxville to Frederick and back three times a week. Abbey recalls that on her first visit she was asked to list 6 desserts, and she couldn’t come up with more than one. She was unable to determine, or much less describe, the differences between a soup and a salad. She felt numb. Her brain felt empty.

Fortunately, her progress each week was noticeable. Speech therapy sessions were reduced to two per week. Sandi assigned a lot of homework, which Abbey did consistently. She started listening to audiobooks, which she enjoyed. Slowly Abbey was able to read again, and ultimately to write. Her cardiologist allowed her to resume driving.

After 10 weeks, she finally started feeling like herself again, able to come back to work and talk with patients. Her family asked her to go slowly and wait until the 13 week mark, when the short-term disability insurance our practice offers to our team members ran out. 

Abbey returned to work on November 18, 2024, and to everyone’s delight she has fully recovered from the stroke! Back to her duties as Front Desk Team Lead, Collections Manager, and Front Desk Coordinator, she is clearly her normal gabby self, as caring and warm as ever!

It’s important to find out what caused this stroke so that another one doesn’t happen. Abbey is now wearing a cardiac monitor to find out if AFib could have been a factor; to date the only identified cause was high BP due to nicotine. Today she no longer vapes and no longer drinks coffee, and her BP is normal without the need for BP medication. 

Abbey is grateful to everyone in our practice for supporting her with text messages and emails, to her front desk colleagues for taking on her workload while she was on medical leave, and to our practice for holding her job while she was unable to work. She is especially grateful to her family, in particular to her son and husband.

Abbey was extremely lucky to have made a full recovery! When asked why she’s going public by disclosing her personal health history, she said that for years she ignored her high BP, rationalizing it away instead of addressing it as a serious medical issue. She urges our patients to take advantage of our clinicians’ offer to have their BP checked at each visit (please ask for a BP reading, if we forget to offer it). Also, be advised that vaping is not much safer than cigarettes when it comes to the body absorbing nicotine.

If words are important to you, please heed Abbey’s advice!

The Connection Between Nicotine Use, Stroke, and Dental Health

Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8315328/

Smoking and vaping are major public health concerns that increase the risk of stroke and negatively affect dental health. Stroke, a leading cause of death and disability in the United States, occurs when blood flow to the brain is blocked. Nicotine, found in cigarettes and e-cigarettes, damages blood vessels, making them stiff and narrow, which increases the likelihood of blood clots. This damage can lead to higher stroke risk, especially for people who smoke regularly.

Signs of a Stroke

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/stroke/signs-symptoms

They include:

• Sudden weakness or numbness in the face, arm, or leg, especially on one side of the body 
• Sudden confusion, trouble speaking, or difficulty understanding speech 
• Sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes 
• Sudden trouble walking, dizziness, loss of balance, or lack of coordination 
• Sudden severe headache with no known cause 
• Feeling or being sick (nausea or vomiting) 
• Memory loss 
• Falling over 

If you or someone you know has any of these symptoms, call 911 right away. Early treatment can minimize brain damage. 

Although smoking rates have decreased, vaping has become more popular, especially among young people. Many believe vaping is safer than smoking, but it still delivers harmful chemicals and nicotine, which can injure blood vessels, lungs, and the heart. These chemicals affect the blood’s ability to clot properly, raising the risk of stroke even for those who only vape. Vaping-related lung injuries (EVALI) have also been reported, with serious consequences, including hospitalizations and deaths.

Act F.A.S.T. to help stroke patients get the treatments they need

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/stroke/signs-symptoms

The stroke treatments that work best are available only if the stroke is recognized and diagnosed within 3 hours of the first symptoms. Stroke patients may not be eligible for these treatments if they don’t arrive at the hospital in time.

If you think someone may be having a stroke, act F.A.S.T. and do the following test:

• F—Face: Ask the person to smile. Does one side of the face droop?
• A—Arms: Ask the person to raise both arms. Does one arm drift downward?
• S—Speech: Ask the person to repeat a simple phrase. Is the speech slurred or strange?
• T—Time: If you see any of these signs, call 9-1-1 right away.

This information helps health care providers determine the best treatment.

Do not drive to the hospital or let someone else drive you. Call 9-1-1 for an ambulance so that medical personnel can begin life-saving treatment on the way to the emergency room.

Effect on Dental Health 

Nicotine use doesn’t just harm the heart and brain; it also affects dental health. Smoking and vaping reduce blood flow to the gums, making it harder for them to heal and fight infections. This increases the risk of gum disease, tooth decay, and even tooth loss. Vaping can also cause dry mouth, which promotes cavities and bad breath. Additionally, the chemicals from nicotine products can stain teeth and damage oral tissues over time.

Understanding the dangers of smoking and vaping is crucial for preventing these health issues. Quitting nicotine use can significantly lower the risk of stroke and improve dental and overall health. Regular dental check-ups and healthy habits support this journey and help maintain a brighter, healthier smile.

Introducing Kari: Our New Patient Coordinator, Here to Welcome You!

We are thrilled to introduce Kari, our new New Patient Coordinator! Kari is here to ensure that every new patient feels warmly welcomed and well-prepared for their dental journey with us. Kari is your go-to person to make sure your first visit with us goes smoothly.

Kari’s role is all about making your experience seamless after your appointment is made but before you come in. She will:

• Answer any questions to provide first appointment guidance.
• Coordinate your insurance benefits and estimate co-payments so you know what to expect.
• Ensure all necessary paperwork is completed ahead of time.
• Request your previous dental records to give our team the full picture of your dental health.
• Follow up after your first visit to check in and address any concerns.

We understand that visiting a new dental office can be overwhelming. Kari’s caring approach makes the process simple and stress-free. Her clear communication and attention to detail keep you informed and prepared every step of the way.

We want our patients to feel like part of our dental family. With Kari’s warm and caring presence, new patients can feel confident that their dental health is in good hands.

We’re excited for you to meet Kari and experience the welcoming, patient-focused care that she provides. If you’re a new patient, Kari can’t wait to connect with you and help you start your journey toward a healthier, happier smile!

Thank You To Our Amazing Team

(Team photo under the worst lighting conditions ever. Missing: Debbie Mason-Rooney)

We want to take a moment to express our deepest gratitude to our team. We are truly fortunate to work with such a dedicated, compassionate, and talented group of people.

To honor our team, we recently gathered for our annual holiday celebration — a time for us to share a meal, swap stories and gifts, and enjoy laughter and good cheer outside of the daily hustle and bustle. These moments together allow us to reflect on our successes, bond as a team, and celebrate everything we’ve accomplished this year.

The holidays are about connection and appreciation, and our team is at the heart of everything we do. From our caring dental professionals to our supportive administrative team each person plays a crucial role in making our practice feel like family. Your dedication to patient care and creating a welcoming environment makes all the difference — and for that, we are truly thankful.

Our holiday gathering was filled with warm smiles, festive cheer, and lots of laughter. It’s these special moments that remind us that a great workplace is more than just a place to work — it’s a community.

Wishing You Joy, Health, and Smiles This Holiday Season!

As the year comes to a close, we want to pause and reflect on what truly matters — you, our amazing patients. Your trust, kindness, and bright smiles are the heart of everything we do. We’re so grateful to be chosen as your trusted dental health provider!

This season of giving and gratitude reminds us that every smile shared, every moment of care, and every connection made has a ripple effect of joy and warmth.

In the spirit of the season, here’s a little poem to brighten your day:

A Smile for the Season

Smiles sparkle brighter than holiday lights,
Warming the coldest of winter nights.
A moment of kindness, a word so sincere,
Spreads joy and connection this time of year.

We’re grateful for you, for the trust that you show,
Together, through seasons, our smiles only grow.

We hope your holidays are filled with peace, joy, and health. As we look ahead to 2025, we’re excited to continue caring for you and your loved ones — helping you maintain your brightest, healthiest smile.

Thank you for being part of our dental family. From all of us, have a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year!