Jennifer Cadigan did not set out to revolutionize the way families think about aging. She began, as many healthcare professionals do, she worked as a clinical dental hygienist in San Diego, building the kind of steady, trusting relationships with patients that form the quiet backbone of primary care. She learned their names, their habits, their fears. She saw them every six months, sometimes more often, and in those appointments she did what hygienists do.
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But Cadigan began to notice something that troubled her. Her patients would mention, almost in passing, the burdens they carried outside the clinic. A mother with dementia who had stopped eating. A father who had fallen and broken his hip. Adult children overwhelmed by caregiving responsibilities they had never anticipated and did not know how to manage. These were not dental problems, exactly, but they were appearing in her dental chair with increasing frequency. And Cadigan, who had always prided herself on listening carefully, started to understand that the crises her patients described were not isolated events. They were part of a larger pattern, a systemic failure to prepare families for what aging actually entails.
She went back to school. She pursued a master's degree in gerontology, not because she wanted to abandon clinical work, but because she wanted to understand the broader context in which her patients were living and dying. What she discovered was that the healthcare system, for all its technological sophistication, remains fundamentally reactive. It waits for something to go wrong and then it intervenes. It does not teach families what to watch for. It does not explain the connections between seemingly minor symptoms and serious, life-altering conditions. It does not, in short, prevent.
Cadigan's insight came from an unexpected place. Cadigan saw what happened when dry mouth, often a side effect of medication, was left unaddressed. She watched patients develop rapid oral decline. She saw the bacterial overgrowth, the inflammation, the infections. And she began to understand that these were not merely oral health issues. They were systemic ones. The same bacteria and inflammation that destroy teeth can contribute to cardiovascular disease. They have been linked to cognitive decline, to dementia, to Alzheimer's disease. What looked like a minor inconvenience was, in fact, a warning sign, one that families were rarely taught to recognize.
This realization both reaffirmed and challenged her sense of purpose. It reaffirmed it because it clarified what she was meant to do: educate families before the damage became irreversible. It challenged her because she understood how common these risks were, how preventable they were, and how little effort the healthcare system was making to explain them. She had found her mission, but she had also found an enormous gap in care.
Now, Cadigan describes her work as being fundamentally about relationships. She listens to her patients and their families. She explains the connections between oral health and systemic health. She teaches prevention tools before a crisis happens in the aging process. It is not glamorous work. It does not involve cutting-edge technology or heroic interventions. But it is work that changes lives, quietly and persistently.
She advises students and early-career professionals to stay curious, to seek interdisciplinary training, to focus on prevention rather than crisis response. She encourages them to get involved with organizations that are working to bridge the gap in healthcare for the aging community. These are not flashy directives, but they reflect a philosophy that Cadigan has come to embody: that meaningful change in healthcare happens not through grand gestures but through consistent, patient-centered attention to the things that matter most.
What Cadigan hopes for the future is a healthcare system that does not wait for disaster. She wants to see a system that prioritizes prevention, education, and early intervention, especially for aging adults and their caregivers. She knows that families are already providing much of the care, often with little guidance on what to expect or what to watch for. She believes the next generation of healthcare professionals can change this by advocating for interdisciplinary training, by valuing caregiver education, and by designing systems that recognize aging as a process we can anticipate and support, not just respond to after something goes wrong.
Cadigan is a practitioner. She works with real patients in real time, and she has learned through experience that the smallest interventions can have the largest consequences. A conversation about dry mouth can lead to a conversation about medication management, which can lead to a conversation about cognitive health, which can lead to a family feeling less alone and more prepared. This is the work she has chosen, and it is work that matters. It matters because it helps people live better, longer, more dignified lives. It matters because it treats aging not as a problem to be solved but as a reality to be understood. And it matters because Jennifer Cadigan has refused to accept that healthcare must always arrive too late.