Maintaining good posture in patient care

Benita Altier, LVT, VTS (Dentistry), owner of Pawsitive Dental Education, provides professional dental instruction and consultation to veterinary practices and conferences, both in the US and internationals. Altier is president-elect for the Arizona Veterinary Technician Association as well as a past president for the Academy of Veterinary Dental Technicians.

Altier presented a continuing education (CE) session about lighting, magnification and seating, during the 2025 Fetch dvm360 Conference in Long Beach, California. In a dvm360 interview, she discussed key points of this CE session including the importance of maintaining good posture while treating patients. This video is a portion of the interview.

The following is a transcript, lightly edited for clarity:

dvm360: Why is good posture so important with dentistry care?

Benita Altier, LVT, VTS (Dentistry): Working in practice for 29 years and actually performing dental procedures, pretty soon you wind up kind of realizing that your body hurts. The things that really start hurting, and the things that I experienced, were things like my neck, my wrists [and] my hands. My back seems to be pretty good, but you know, people have those issues as well. And I started thinking, ‘Well, gosh, how is [it] that I'm dealing with this type of injury or chronic pain, and how could I potentially stop that from happening? And, how could I also help to prevent this from happening to other people?

I started really being more aware of why lighting and magnification was important. That's when I decided to get my first set of loupes, we call them, and light that will help to focus light on the area where I'm working. And when I started employing that, I realized that I was really suffering for no reason before that. I could now sit up [straighter], I can look down through the oculars. I could actually see what I was doing a lot better.

But the most important thing is wearing something like that corrected my posture, because I didn't realize [that] when you're trying to work on a patient, you're adapting your body to that particular animal, the height of the table, whatever type of seating you may or may not have like you're really having to kind of become a contortionist trying to get your head closer to the area where you can see and that's usually going to cause you to be in some sort of uncomfortable posture for a long period of time, which then leads to these sort of maladaptation. The human body can't adjust for that type of thing over a long period of time, and so then you wind up with, you know, injuries which can lead to permanent disabilities and things that could potentially even cause people to have to change industries or not do that kind of work anymore.

To read more news and view expert insights from Fetch Long Beach, visit dvm360’s dedicated site for conference coverage at https://www.dvm360.com/conference/fetch-long-beach