The emergence of personalized periodontics offers an exciting move toward a medical model of disease management, namely recognizing the individual as the central component to what are very complex diseases. The effects of tobacco, alcohol, medications , uncontrolled diabetes, obesity, malnutrition, allostatic load, and stress must be factored into a personalized care recreational model for holistic management of periodontal diseases. Individualizing risk of periodontitis is an essential requirement to move the field of periodontitis forward and could revolutionize the way that we understand, research and practice periodontology.