Practice Stories
Dental hygienist · oral pathology educator · The Path of RDH
A Venezuelan-trained dentist who rebuilt her career as a US dental hygienist explains how she learned to stop shrinking on camera — and how she uses AI to translate her expertise without losing her voice.
Andreina Sucre trained as a dentist in Venezuela, then completed a residency in oral pathology and oral surgery. When she and her family moved to the United States, the credential didn't travel with her. "I felt kind of disconnected with the profession," she says, "until I found out that in Florida I was able, by taking the board exams, to become a dental hygienist." It wasn't the path she'd trained for, but it was a way back in. "That was like, okay, that seems like my way to go and to reconnect with my profession." She got her license and started building a network from day one.
A friend, Amber Lovato, who focuses on the Latin American community's approach to dental care, gave her the nudge that became a career. "She was like, 'Okay, if you want to talk about something, you should talk about what you know, which is like oral pathology.'" That's how she became The Path of RDH — a content brand built to make oral pathology, one of dental school's most dreaded subjects, feel less frightening to hygienists, students, and patients alike.
Her content strategy shifts by platform. Instagram and LinkedIn skew toward dental professionals and international dentists like herself, retraining in a new country. TikTok reaches something else entirely — regular people searching "what is candidiasis" who stumble onto one of her videos. She's precise about what that content is and isn't. "I do not give any medical advice. My content is not for diagnosis. But maybe for those people who are not in the dental field, they can use that to expand their knowledge, and have an extra tool" — something to bring back to their own provider.
Translating between those two audiences is where AI enters her workflow. She's named her ChatGPT Marge, after Marge Simpson, and talks to it the way she talks to a colleague. "Marge, how can I, without infantilizing this information, explain this in easy-to-digest terms to other people, so they can relate?" She doesn't type prompts — she talks to it out loud, the way she'd talk over coffee with a friend, then asks it to hold that same register on the page. "It helps me big time to really know how to tailor my message without losing my voice."
For a long time, what kept Sucre off camera wasn't a skills gap. It was something closer to training. "The way I was trained — health-related professions, at least in my country — we are formed that we believe in altruism. We believe that we need to put the patient first, and we do not believe in showing, being show-off." Then she read an article on professionalism that reframed the whole premise. "If you have a knowledge about this topic, and you feel like 100 percent sure that you know — part of your job is to let others know that information. Otherwise, you're not doing any service. You're doing a disservice."
So this year she committed to showing up daily — reels, carousels, every platform, all at once. Within a month, the commitment broke her. "By the end of the first month, I was completely burned out. This was unsustainable, for just a single person." She weighed hiring help against her own admitted "micromanagement issues," then chose a third option: permission to scale back. "I don't have to post every single day. I mean, who is forcing me? No one is forcing me. So I can post good content two or three times a week. And what is the worst thing that could happen? That I'm going to lose some followers? So what? That I'm going to gain more? Yes."
She's tried the tools that do more — dubbing a video in another language, generating a full script paired with a photo to build an entire clip. She stopped. "It still lacks that human factor... that touch." Trend-chasing bothers her for the same reason: "you are using like a cookie-cutter mold to fit whatever people wants to see at that moment." She's also candid about the platform math she's had to unlearn — the instinct to reduce every explanation to fifteen seconds and a fifth-grade vocabulary. "Do I have to — I don't want to say dumb down my message — but do I really have to do that?" AI is the tool she uses to find the middle ground, without losing what makes it hers.
Sucre is unambiguous that she's "for AI" — with a condition attached every time. "If you still remain grounded on your critical thinking... if you don't let AI substitute your voice, go for it. If you just want to go for the easy way and do nothing — ooh, you are in big trouble." The line she returns to isn't rhetorical. It's a real question she asks herself about the version of her content that's increasingly assisted: "Are you going to recognize yourself in a year from today? You might just be a billboard, a mannequin, or something."
She hasn't fully resolved how far the assistance can go before that happens — she's still finding the edge in real time, post by post. What she's certain of is where the responsibility lands regardless of how much AI touches the process. "Patients trust people. They don't trust systems. They don't trust AI. They can only trust us, because we are the ones in front of them." AI can process data, she says. "The empathy is still human. And we need to acknowledge that that part is on us."
Watch the conversation to hear her talk through Marge, the burnout month, and the mannequin question she's still asking herself.