Our hygienists will begin your dental cleaning appointment with a review of your medical history and will address any questions or concerns you have regarding your teeth or your oral hygiene.
We recommend that you bring a list of the medications you are currently taking, if there are any. At this time, we will also take your blood pressure. Our hygienists will gently remove the calculus and plaque build ups with an ultrasonic scaler and hand instruments. At regular intervals, we will evaluate the health of your gums by measuring the height of the space between your gums and teeth and modify our recommendation accordingly.
Depending on your individual need, we recommend regular x-rays to help diagnose early diseases that may not be visible to the naked eye until they are very advanced. Prevention is always less expensive, more predictable and has a better outcome than treating something when it is bigger. To understand this better, let us give you a commonly understood medical example – cancer always starts as a small uncontrolled growth in a single part of our body or a certain type of tissue and then it slowly grows to affect your lymph nodes and blood vessels and eventually travels to the other parts of the body – prevention of cancer dictates regular checkups to find these cancerous tissues when they are still small and have not affected other parts of your body and when treated at this stage it is a simple surgery to remove the tumour and they have close to a 100% success rate – however, when cancer grows and affects multiple parts of the body, the success rate of the treatment falls down to less than 30% and it often involves chemotherapy, radiation therapy and multiple surgeries increasing the cost and time associated with the treatment and reducing the predictability of the outcome.
The dental examples are dental caries or decay or cavities, periodontal or gum disease, bruxism or abnormal grinding. Dental caries when treated at the right time are treated with a simple filling that takes a single appointment and has close to a 100% success rate with close to a 95% success rate over 20 years, If not caught, prevented and treated early, dental caries and the bacteria that cause eventually spread to the pulp of the tooth or close to it, infecting the pulp and eventually the bone and later can infect other parts of the body and need extensive treatment such as antibiotics and root canal treatment that may need one to three appointments and the success rate drops to less than 90% and the long term success falls to less than 70% over 10 years. Regular cleanings, exams and radiographs help us in implementing our goal of preventing dental diseases early rather than treating them later when they hurt.
