# Episode 3 — What Airway and Myo Can Open Up in Your Career **Length target:** 12–14 minutes (~2,300 words) **Publish:** Launch day (drop with Ep 1 + 2) --- ## Show notes The first two episodes were about patients and practices. Episode 3 is about the people doing the work. Kirsten talks through what adding airway and myofunctional therapy skills can open up in a career — income, autonomy, and a renewed sense of challenge — for hygienists, assistants, and doctors alike. If you've been wondering whether there's more room to grow in your role, this episode is for you. **In this episode:** - (00:00) A conversation about growth that's worth having out loud - (02:45) The four areas of growth - (04:30) Income: what airway/myo actually adds - (07:00) Autonomy: building something that's yours - (09:30) Renewed challenge: why this work re-energizes clinicians - (11:30) Identity: growing into the full scope of your role - (13:30) Your invitation **Resources:** - 1-Hour CE Course → optimizedairway.com/ce-course (PODCAST20) - Full OAE Certification (the path to practicing myo) → optimizedairway.com/oae-certification --- ## Script Welcome back to Optimized Airway. I'm Kirsten Trevisonn. Episode 1 was about why airway shows up across so many roles on a dental team. Episode 2 was the how-to — bringing it into a practice as a shared project. Today, Episode 3, is about what this path can open up for you personally — whether you're a hygienist (hy-JEE-nist), an assistant, or a doctor thinking about growing your own scope. Dental hygiene, dental assisting, and dentistry all ask a lot of the people in them. A lot of us trained with real excitement, and somewhere in the daily rhythm of production goals and back-to-back patients, that excitement can get quieter than we'd like. I want to talk about what airway and myofunctional therapy did for me — not just clinically, but as a person — because I think it's one of the more energizing paths available in this field right now. And before the frameworks and numbers: if you've ever felt a little sheepish about wanting more — more meaning, more income, more autonomy, more challenge — that's a completely normal thing to want. Wanting more is part of how any profession grows. Every advance in scope of practice, from local anesthetic to independent practice, started with someone wanting more. That instinct is the whole reason this podcast exists. [BREATH] I think about this in four areas: income, autonomy, renewed challenge, and identity. Let's take them one at a time. **Area one: income.** The average dental hygienist in North America earns somewhere between 45 and 50 dollars an hour. In Canada that's roughly 80 to 95 thousand a year full-time; in the US, depending on the state, 75 to 110. A certified myofunctional therapist billing private-pay rates typically charges between 150 and 250 dollars an hour, sometimes more depending on market and credentials. You don't need to leave clinical hygiene, assisting, or practice ownership to add this. Most people I work with start by carving out one half-day a week and seeing four myo patients in that window. At $175 an hour, that's $700 in half a day — about $36,000 a year on top of existing income. That's not a lifestyle overhaul. It's a down payment, a maternity-leave cushion, a paid-off student loan, room to drop one clinical day without losing income. The training and certification cost typically pays for itself within three to six months of seeing patients. Here's a real example. One of my grads finished her certification about 14 months ago. She works in a general practice three days a week and runs her myo program out of the same office on Fridays. In her first year, she cleared just under forty thousand dollars in myo revenue and used it to pay off her student loans. She texted me last month: "I owe zero dollars, for the first time since I was twenty-two." That's what happens when a skilled clinician adds a high-value service. [BREATH] **Area two: autonomy.** This one's harder to put a number on. If you've ever worked a schedule you didn't build, in a role that didn't leave much room to shape your own day, you know the feeling this addresses. Myo offers something a lot of clinical roles don't always include: ownership of the full relationship with a patient. When you take on a myo case, you're the lead clinician. You build the plan, set the pace, and see it through. That shift matters. For a lot of people, it's the difference between doing excellent clinical work inside someone else's structure and building a piece of the practice that's genuinely yours. Most OAE grads land in one of three models: adding myo as a service line inside their existing practice, renting operatory time to run it semi-independently, or opening a standalone myo studio. All three are realistic, and all three are open to any hygienist, assistant, or doctor willing to get certified. It's also worth naming — for anyone balancing this with family life — that myo tends to be a flexible model. Programs can include virtual visits, schedules can flex around school pickups, and a lot of people find it fits the life they're actually living, not just the clinical calendar. [BREATH] **Area three: renewed challenge.** A lot of burnout in clinical dentistry isn't really about physical demand, though that's real too — it's cognitive monotony. Doing the same procedure for the thirty-thousandth time eventually flattens the intellectual side of the work. Myofunctional therapy brings that challenge back. Every case is a bit of a puzzle — tongue function, breathing, sleep, posture, developmental and sometimes orthodontic history all fitting together. It asks for a different kind of clinical thinking. What I tell people who feel stretched thin: the antidote to that kind of fatigue is often not less work, but different work — hours that use a different part of the brain, where the patient leaves saying "thank you for changing my life" instead of "see you in six months." I've heard from clinicians, months into building a myo practice, that their clinical days feel more sustainable again — not because those days got easier, but because they're no longer carrying the whole professional identity alone. Having a second area of practice gives the rest of the week more context. [BREATH] **Area four: identity.** This one's harder to put into words, but it might matter most. A lot of clinicians — hygienists, assistants, and yes, doctors too — carry a quiet sense that they're capable of more than their day-to-day role always calls for. Growing into airway and myo work is one concrete way to close that gap. It changes how patients, colleagues, and other providers see the work you do. Patients introduce you differently. Other providers refer to you by name. Families make a point of asking for you specifically. I remember the first time a pediatric ENT called our office asking for me by name — not the dentist's name, mine. He'd had two patients tell him, "My hygienist figured this out, and I want her looped in on the plan." That was a turning point in how I introduced myself and thought about my own scope. That kind of growth is available to anyone willing to build toward it. [BREATH] So that's the case: income, autonomy, renewed challenge, identity. All real, all documented, all within reach for hygienists, assistants, and doctors who want to grow in this direction. One honest note before I close: this isn't effortless. Certification takes real work, building a caseload takes months, and not every colleague or patient will be on board right away. That's normal — it's what building anything worthwhile looks like. What I can say is that the clinicians who stick with it tend to be in a noticeably different professional place within about eighteen months. Here's your invitation. If anything in these first three episodes sparked something, do one thing this week: go to optimizedairway.com/ce-course and look at the 1-Hour CE Course. It's a low-stakes way to explore this — one hour, $199, or 20% off with code PODCAST20 — and you'll leave with the screening framework, the parent scripts, and a real sense of whether this path fits you. If you finish that hour wanting the full clinical pathway, that's what OAE Certification is for — and it's a conversation we'll keep having throughout this podcast. [BREATH] Thank you for listening to the first three episodes of Optimized Airway. Please hit follow, leave a review, and share this with a colleague who might want to hear it — that's how this show, and this work, grows. Next Tuesday we're back with a brand new episode, and every Tuesday after that. I'm Kirsten Trevisonn. This has been Optimized Airway. Take care of yourselves out there.