Taking advantage of every opportunity for five decades

PART 1 – ANNE BOSY
Taking advantage of every opportunity
for five decades
For clarification on this article, we reached Anne Bosy in Las Vegas where she was
attending the esteemed Crown Council meetings. She was dealing with e-mails prior
to her 7 a.m. breakfast – a day that would end at 10 p.m. This might not be a typical
day for Anne, but 10-hour days are fairly common as co-founder and chief scientist of
Oravital Inc. in Toronto. This is the first in a two-part series on the life and work of
Anne Bosy, whose career spans five decades as a practising dental hygienist, lecturer,
educator, researcher and innovator. The next issue will focus on what dental hygienists
can learn from her research.
T
alk to Anne Bosy, and you’d think
she just graduated from dental
hygiene school. Her infectious
enthusiasm and passion for the profession
belies the 50-plus year career that has
earned her the distinction of being the
longest continuously registered dental
hygienist in Ontario.
But this is far from being her only
claim to fame.
The farm girl from northern Saskat­
chewan migrated to Toronto at the tender
age of 17 to study dental hygiene at the
University of Toronto because “it sounded
different and there were few career options
for women at the time.” Since then she has
carved out a reputation as a leading
researcher and innovator in the global fight
against bad breath and periodontal disease.
Her resume reads like a cross between
a university professor’s CV and a corporate CEO’s bio – with a bit of James Bondlike espionage thrown in.
• Three degrees – Bachelor of Science,
Master of Science and Master of Education
• 12-plus years as a full-time dental
hygienist
• A two-year stint with Canadian
University Services Overseas (CUSO),
in which she worked undercover for
the Government of Barbados to flush
out bogus dental clinics and revamp
the country’s dental health program
• Three years as a public health dental
hygienist for the Region of Peel
• 25 years teaching and developing courses
in the Allied Health Department (now
the Centre for Health Sciences) at George
Brown College, where she designed the
first modular computer-assisted teaching system (her Master of Education was
in computer applications)
• Instructor in microbiology and immunology at Regency Dental Hygiene Academy
6
Focus • April 2015
• Accreditor for the Canadian Dental
Association
• Co-founder of the Fresh Breath Clinic,
Toronto, specializing in the assessment
and treatment of halitosis
• Originator of the Oravital System, a
scientific approach to diagnosing and
treating oral infections
• Co-founder and chief scientist of
Oravital Inc., which coaches dental
clinics in the Oravital System and
develops antimicrobial rinses
• Respected researcher and lecturer in
microbiology and the causes and treatment of halitosis and periodontal disease
It’s an illustrious list of achievements
rare among dental hygienists, in a career,
she admits, that’s been fashioned from
one serendipitous event after another.
“Whenever I was asked to try something different, my response was ‘You
want me to do what?’, but I never said ‘I
am not going to do this.’ I took advantage
of every opportunity that came my way,”
says Anne.
By 1991, armed with B.Sc. and M.Ed.
degrees earned part-time while raising
three children, Anne got an offer that
launched her research career. She was
asked to assist with a U of T summer
research project examining the effectiveness of sulphide monitoring to measure
halitosis.
“I measured each patient’s breath.
When the summer was over, U of T offered
me a substantial grant to continue the
research.”
She enrolled full-time in the university’s Master of Science program and turned
the project into her thesis. What she
learned led her to co-found the Fresh
Breath Clinic, a Saturday morning experiment that quickly grew – when U of T
shut down its halitosis clinic, many of the
Anne Bosy
patients were referred to Anne.
Over the next 13 years, she established
herself as a leading researcher in breath
odour and laid the groundwork for what
would later become the Oravital System.
Her scientific approach – she was among
the first to use microbiology sampling to
diagnose halitosis and periodontal disease
– was revolutionary at the time.
Today, partly through her efforts, we
now know that dental plaque is a colourless biofilm that can’t be detected in routine dental visits, that periodontitis is a
disease resulting from that biofilm, and
that oral microbiology assessment can
serve as a rapid diagnostic tool for detecting the disease at its earliest stages.
But this septuagenarian scientist-cumentrepreneur shows no signs of slowing
down. She continues to conduct and communicate her research, manage a grueling schedule of lectures and presentations,
and promote and expand her business –
close to 100 clinics in Canada and the U.S.
now use the Oravital System.
Her goal is to convince dental hygienists everywhere to treat any bleeding in
the mouth seriously. Says Anne: “What if
you went to your physician with a wound,
and he said, ‘It’s only a little bleeding. I’m
just going to run this steel wool over it.
Come back in three months and we’ll do
it again.’ We need to say, ‘You’re bleeding.
Let’s find out why.” •
www.odha.on.ca