Episode description

Jill Sirko brings an unconventional background in English, medieval literature, health-care advocacy, and research translation to a conversation about one of dentistry's biggest challenges: getting good science into practice. She discusses why research can take years to reach clinicians, how science communication can help close that gap, and why reliable sources matter in an age of social media and AI-generated information.

Sirco also explains why her work focuses on oral-systemic health rather than dentistry alone, and why dental hygienists are especially well positioned to have meaningful conversations with patients about connections between oral and overall health. The conversation covers patient education, misinformation, women's health, and the importance of making complex research understandable and actionable.

The power of making science accessible

Getting to know Jill Sirko

Jackie Sanders: Thank you for joining us. My name is Jackie Sanders, chief editor of RDH Magazine. And today I get to spend some time with my co-host Andrew and our guest, Jill Sirco. Let's start with you, Andrew. How are you today?

Andrew Johnston: I am buzzing again. I love recording days. Recording days are the best. Had a great weekend. Saw a lot of really good friends at the credits meeting. Like I am just, I'm flying high. How are you doing? You just got vacation.

Jackie Sanders: I just got home from Niagara Falls and playing in the water. So I'm in a great mood. Yeah. How are you, Jill? How was your morning?

Jill Sirko: I'm great. Yeah, I spent the morning writing and I'm really excited to be here now.

Andrew Johnston: Well, you know, I'm interested in this. Can you just jump in, Jackie? I'm really sorry. This is kind of our first introduction to you, Jill, and I've seen some of your posts on LinkedIn. And the fact that you opened up your morning doing writing does not surprise me. You seem to be like a special kind of, I'm gonna call you a nerd. And in the most lovely of ways, like I love people that love research. We just had another guest on and she's all about the research. I'm just like, your guys' brains are so important in this world. So thank you for just getting up and writing.

Jill Sirko: Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I love writing. I have actually a background in English, and so writing is like my first love. And I now spend a lot of my time translating and explaining hard science and making it fun and accessible for people.

It's great fun for me and I love learning too. Like if I could have stayed in school for the rest of my life, I probably would have. So this is a really ideal kind of happy medium, do research, learn a lot, and also get to talk to people about what it means and why it matters.

From medieval literature to health-care research

Andrew Johnston: It's interesting. So let's go back into what your background is first. Let's talk about your degrees and all of that. And then I do want to transition to kind of the career path that you've kind of taken. So like how did your career and your research lead you to become so interested in that connection with the oral health and women's health atmospheres?

Jill Sirko: Yeah, it's not like a typical career trajectory, I would say. So my background is in English. I have a master's in humanities and social thought, which is like, I kind of say like, that's where I learned how to think critically.

My PhD is in medieval literature and I really focused on systems and the way that institutions kind of function as power structures in the way that literature subverts those power structures. And it's surprisingly relevant to so much of what happens today in institutions.

And I think of like institutions can be like health care, right? Health care or policies or systems that we have in place now that determines who gets care, who has access to care, how does it work? How do we even talk about how information is passed around to different people?

So thinking about systems is very much at the core of how my brain just works. And so I was finishing my PhD and I had my first child and she was born with complex medical needs. And all of a sudden I was like in the middle of this crazy world of specialists and therapists and appointments and I was like, how the heck does anyone do this? Is wild.

This is so fragmented. It's so hard to get information. It's so hard to know how to handle it. What about all the people who don't have an education? I mean, I was like working on my PhD and I had trouble with it.

So I kind of started thinking about like feeling pretty strongly that I needed to change what my plan was, that there was a real world problem that my skill set could be applied to and I wanted to address it.

So I decided about a year after she was born that I was going to transition into health care and I had no idea what that would look like. So I mean, it was very scary at the time. I'm like, I have lots of skills and trying to convince people that a medievalist has skills in health care is like, how do you translate that, right?

So it was a big learning experience. And where I trained, it was very much like you go to school there, you become a professor of English. That was it. That was like what I trained to be. And so they don't have a whole like, here's how your skills can apply in other areas, right? So there was like a really huge learning curve for me.

But what I ended up doing was working for several different nonprofits, working in rural North Carolina, talking with families, thinking about patient advocacy, thinking about how to provide health-care information in really accessible ways. And it just kind of grew from there.

So I'm very passionate about making research available to people. I think it's super important for people to know what's happening in science. And it takes about 20 years for what's happening in science to get into practice. And that's just for me way too long.

So that's the other motivation. I'm not a patient person. I'm like, let's get this happening.

I started working at ADA Forsyth, which is a research institute in Massachusetts. And I started working there about, I guess, five years ago almost. And it was wonderful because I had been wanting to get back into research. I had been wanting to have something that was less on the ground and something that had a bigger impact.

But bringing into that all of my experiences working one-on-one with families, that was really important to me and really helped me just kind of see the world in a completely different way and thinking about the factors that, there's parts of the country where access to care is not a given, access to education is not a given, people don't have toothbrushes, right?

Additional reading: Do you really know what oral-systemic means?

We know about these rural areas, but we don't often go to those rural areas and hang out. And I did that. So like I always have that in the back of my mind and just knowing the love that people have for their families and for their kids and everything, like it's just really something that really I carry with me.

Why does research take so long to reach practice?

Andrew Johnston: Can I ask a quick question about just—and we're going to take a step back to that research because you were talking about this bottleneck that happens. And I was curious, if it takes 20 years for the science to now get into practice, is the bottleneck just because there isn't a system in place to get that information there quickly?

Is it because we have to go through that, get it all published, get it taught into schools and then embrace it and that just takes a long time or I mean, is there a way to fast track this or is it always going to be this way?

Jill Sirko: I think people are trying. Like there's specialties now for research translation and making sure that what's happening in research then becomes part of clinical practice. It's just—it just is a lot of things. Like it's part of it is like how do you get the information to clinicians?

How do you, how do you, like they're not, they don't have time to look at academic journals and think about these things. So yeah, there's not really a mechanism to convert it quickly.

So it's about like awareness too. It's about taking some of the recommendations that are coming out of those research, different research buckets to say, okay, now we have several different studies that are showing that this is like what's recommended and now let's try to put it into practice.

It just takes a lot of time and coordination. And often it's reframing what's already in place, right? Which change is hard. We all know that. So there's also that barrier of how do we make change based on new information? It's a workflow thing.

Andrew Johnston: Fascinating and kind of unfortunate.

Jackie Sanders: It's unfortunate, because you've got this great information and these changes you want to make, but the process of getting the information to everybody, and like you said, drive change. People don't want to change.

Science communication in the age of misinformation

Jill Sirko: But that's why science communication exists. And I think that's something that people are having a lot more access to now that social media and everything is making it easier for people to access information. There's so much more available now than there was 50 years ago, right? So things could potentially go quicker.

Andrew Johnston: But how do you then combat the opposite of that, which is misinformation also gets out quicker and sometimes the biggest, loudest voices are the ones that are embraced and accepted, even if they're not correct.

Jill Sirko: It's very, very true. So I think that's something that I, I'm hoping my kids learn. I worry about this a lot just because of my own background and like the importance of where do you get your information is like kind of ingrained in how I was trained.

And I don't know that that's going to remain post AI post, like everything is different now than it was. And how do people learn? How do people get information?

They like, if my kids are going to answer this question, they will be like, YouTube. I learn everything I need to know on YouTube, mom. If you need to know anything, just go look on YouTube. And I'm like, kids, you got to know it, like, where did they get their information though?

Anyone can make a video. Like, how did they get their information? So making sure you have, you're using reliable sources that you're fact checking, that you're, you know, all of that. That's really important and hard.

And I think like that's something that I'm committed to. Like when I'm writing anything, I'm always making sure to cite my sources because people need to be able to look. What is that primary source? Where are you getting your information from? And is it legit?

Finding trustworthy health information

Andrew Johnston: The clinicians and the chairs, like you said, they don't really have time to vet. Do you have some pretty good resources or places that they could go in a pinch and that they're just always going to be the trusted outlet that, hey, this is the place?

I mean, are there groups? Are there, where is all of this?

Jill Sirko: We're hoping that our company is going to provide that. We do have a substantial, we're building a substantial library of information and we have a whole research component that we have like a master bibliography where we're collecting solid sources for information about oral systemic health.

And it's something that we're all committed to. Everybody on the team is very science and evidence based. And we are, we have a really great team. So everybody can just, and expertise wise, committed to that, making sure that we're providing only evidence-based information at all times.

Jackie Sanders: Just said a giant melting pot. All of the facts are here. Yeah, tell us a little bit more about the company, Jill. Sorry, that's what Andrew was asking.

Expanding the conversation from dentistry to oral health

Jill Sirko: While I was at ADA Forsyth, I met my co-founder and colleague, Megan Pugash Gordon, who is an oral biologist. And the two of us hit it off.

And one of the things I was working on a lot when I was there was Dentech, which is their innovation investment forum. And I met a lot of really cool companies, CEOs, people who were bringing science into like how do we accelerate the practice, right?

How do we accelerate getting innovation into offices, into the patient's hands? How do we do that? And also industry leaders, lots of industry leaders coming through those doors and having conversations.

And one of the problems that I felt like was kind of a barrier is that people talk about dental and they think often in the general public. I am not saying anything about your audience and hygienists. I'm talking about people who don't know anything about anything about oral health really, that when you say dentistry, people think teeth.

When you say dentistry, people think cosmetic, right? People think, how does my mouth look? How does my smile look?

And so every time we are talking about science in oral health, we're very careful not to say dentistry. Not because dentistry is an important, super important, but it's the profession.

Whereas oral health is everything that's going on in your mouth. And that is much more expansive than what is currently incorporated into dental care.

Additional reading: Why patients still don't "get" the oral-systemic link

And so it's also parts, it goes through the rest of the body. It's systemic, it has a systemic connection. And one of the reasons for building our company was to make people, general people aware of the important connections in oral and systemic health so that they can, keep an eye out for themselves, improve their health and think about like, okay, well, these two things are correlated.

Like I need to be talking to my doctor about this and he's talking about this with my dentist. I need to connect the two for them because they don't necessarily know the importance.

And we want to empower patients to be able to ask good questions and get really solid information, science-based information about the connections between the two.

Why hygienists have an important role

Jackie Sanders: So you're talking about when you talk to the general public and you bring up dentistry, the patient immediately thinks of teeth. If you're talking to them about a dental hygienist, is it the same thing?

Jill Sirko: If I'm talking to them about a dental hygienist? I'm not really talking to people about the dentist or the hygienist. I'm talking more about just in general when like word associations.

But yeah, I think hygienists are wonderful because they have such, they're kind of like nurses in a way, right? Like patient care is top of mind when they're the ones who are listening and engaging and are in a position to offer such good information to people while they're sitting in the chair.

So this information that we're developing around women's health, we are going to be targeting hygienists a lot because we want them to have this and feel really comfortable with thinking through some of these connections so that they can have good conversations when they have patients in the chair who are maybe experiencing some of the symptoms.

Jackie Sanders: Yeah, I wasn't trying to put you on the spot as much as I'm just trying to understand the audience and making them more aware that we are caring for not just their teeth, but their bodies. It's just something we struggle with always.

Jill Sirko: It always is a problem and I think it's very much a word association and I'm only saying that—I'm not only saying that. I say that because I do like study language. That's like, that is my perspective.

But when I'm talking with people who are not in the field and I'm like, they're like, what do you do? Okay, like what do I do? It's hard to describe to someone, right? Why on earth would you choose oral health? What is like, what is that about?

You know? And then trying to explain why it matters.

Well, there's actually connections, between gum inflammation and cardiovascular disease.

What? Are you serious? Like, I had no idea. And that's how the conversations go.

And if you look online on LinkedIn or something and you look at the conversations happening, you would never know that there's this huge barrier that in the general public, no one has this information.

This is not common knowledge. It's getting better. It's getting more prevalent because people are working really hard to get it out, but it's not common knowledge.

And I'm not talking about like, these are among educated circles. These are educated people. These are friends and people I hang out with and I talk informally with and meet wherever on an airplane. You know, like these are just the average public does not know and they should.

I got a message from a doctor this morning who was like, yeah, oral health is really—we're starting to see some research in that space.

And I'm like, there's been research in that space for a while. There's substantial research in that space. And it's just now starting to become public knowledge.

That's all. You're just hearing about it now, but it's there.

Connecting with Jill

Andrew Johnston: Yeah, I'm just so excited for the stuff that we're going to be working on together. In the meantime, however, again, the listeners are going to want to listen to you. They're going to follow you. They're going to want to read the stuff that you're posting. Where might the audience find you?

Jill Sirko: So I am mostly on LinkedIn. That's where I feel most comfortable because I'm a scientist, researcher, not a scientist at all. I'm a researcher, but I like talking about science.

And I have recently stepped into the Instagram, Facebook space. So I can be found there too, but it's less comfortable for me. I like conversations more than social media.

So reaching out and connecting with me directly is also welcome. I'm always looking for people to connect with and spread the word. And, anyone who feels passionately about the importance of oral health is someone I want to talk to.

Andrew Johnston: Excellent. All right. We'll make sure we put those in the show notes.

Jill Sirko: Yeah.

Andrew Johnston: All right. Thanks for being here, Jill.

Jill Sirko: Thanks so much, guys. Appreciate it. See you later.

Editor's note: You can also contact Jill at [email protected]. She's the cofounder and CEO of KaiAvora Health.