June is Oral Health Month, which is a great time to ask yourself if you’re doing all you can to maintain healthy teeth and gums. The smart routine is to maintain excellent oral hygiene at home and rely on your dentist to provide professional dental care.
Replace Old Dental Work
Restorative dentistry solutions are strong and designed to last, sometimes for decades. Eventually, though, age and use will wear them out and they will need to be replaced, sometimes with a different dental restoration.
If you have any silver fillings and you’ve had them for years, they could be doing more harm than good. Over time, these amalgam fillings expand, discolor your teeth, and cause damage from the inside out. Getting them replaced with a tooth-colored filling might be a possibility, but chances are that treated tooth isn’t strong enough to handle another filling. But you’re not out of luck – in circumstances like this, a customized porcelain crown caps the entire tooth and protects it from disintegration and infection.
Take Advantage of Dental Innovations
Are you tired of your dentures? Do they irritate your gums or slip out of place? Does a covered palate frustrate you and interrupt pleasurable eating? You might be a good candidate for dental implants, which are the best solution for missing teeth. Some people even enjoy the benefits of implant dentures which combine the best of both restorations for a secure, permanent tooth replacement solution.
Get a Teeth Cleaning with Invisalign or Braces
It’s important to get your teeth professionally cleaned and examined every six months no matter what, but it’s especially critical if you are wearing Invisalign or metal braces.
It’s easy to continue to clean your teeth thoroughly when you wear clear aligners because they’re removable, but thoroughness is critical to ensure that food particles and bacteria don’t get caught between teeth and Invisalign trays.
When brackets and wires cover your teeth, it’s much more difficult to clean in all the tight spaces – a professional teeth cleaning, sometimes more often than every six months, will keep tooth enamel healthy.
Say Yes to X-Rays
Some insurance plans do not cover annual x-rays and some people don’t want to get x-rays because they feel uncomfortable. What your Red Bank dentist wants every patient to know is that x-rays are technically non-negotiable. There are plenty of problems that can be seen on the surface of your teeth and gums, but there is no way to know what’s going on underneath the gumline without digital images.
Modern x-rays are affordable and necessary – they reveal early problems that can often be treated with minimal dental care instead of waiting for a complication to become severe.
Prioritize Your Dental Care
Get the dental care you need right now from your Red Bank dentist Dr. Carole Sherrod Jewell and her dental team. Schedule a consultation at Red Bank Dentistry to get your oral health evaluated and tended to as soon as possible so you can enjoy a beautiful, healthy, strong smile.
