It’s important to have a great dental routine
Preventative care in our office is a very big thing. If we can stop something small and prevent it from becoming big, I feel like we’ve done the best service possible. Years ago, we started out with sealants for the teeth, so that many of the children in our practice never really ended up with cavities. Since then, technologies have come along. We have a special laser that will read cavities even at the smallest level. Many people will come in and they’ll say, “How do I know I don’t have a cavity for sure? Does it always show up on the X-rays? Can you always find them? “And it’s true, X-rays, they’re wonderful, but that in combination with using a laser, you can find those, and when you can find them, especially when they’re smaller or even in medium size, we can use a laser instrument without having to do any numbing because there is no discomfort from the laser. We’re able to do small little restorations, and patients go out smiling. They’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I did not know you could do this.” And many of the new patients that we get are from those patients. They’re saying, “Hey, can you actually do some of these things with your laser without any discomfort, without me having to worry about that I’m gonna feel something?” And we can. That’s one of the most wonderful things that I think we’ve been able to incorporate into our practice.
We also have special things where we can seal the teeth, especially as we get to be older adults, we get more roots that show. We get root sensitivity. Root sensitivity oftentimes comes sometimes when the bite is not quite right, and many times we can correct that bite and try to make that aspect better. But on patients where, one, you’re not able to do that, or two, they still have sensitivity, even though they’re straighter, just maybe less sensitivity but they want it to go away completely, we actually have things that can seal those roots. It’s kind of like having, you know, some wood on the side of your house. The root is very woody. It’s not glass-like like the rest of our tooth, and it’s very subject to all the things that are bad in the mouth, the acids, the plaque. It’s like having that siding on your house that’s never had any paint or stain on it. The wood deteriorates.
And we find that that’s one of the biggest problems that our patients are seeing as they’re getting older, as they’re having more and more dental work done because their roots are deteriorating. Thank goodness the technologies are now allowing us to put a simple coating on many of those roots to help prevent that. Granted, it doesn’t last forever just like, you know, painting a house every so many years, or every so much time, you have to maybe add another coat. But at least we know that they’re not gonna end up getting really large issues and having to have root canals and things like that. I hate to use those words because I don’t really wanna try to scare someone. But we can help prevent many of those kinds of things that previously we just had to wait and say, “Hey, brush a little better, could you? You know, can you floss a little bit more?” Now, we still say that, but we actually have something that we can employ on a tooth that gives us a real shot at not having those kinds of things happen to us in the future.
