The Importance of General Dentistry for Optimal Oral Health
Everyone is aware certain practices and routines are crucial to overall health. It is challenging to dispute the essentiality of healthy eating, exercise, and getting plenty of sleep to optimize your overall health. However, what about your dental health?
Brushing and flossing are excellent habits that come to mind as optimal for oral health. However, do these practices relegate general dentistry to the background? Six monthly visits to the dentist are also essential to maintain good oral health and are a crucial line of defense against various oral health issues.
How Does General Dentistry Help with Oral Health?
General Dentistry in Worcester, MA, is your first point of contact for any dental health issue whether minor or significant. General dentists are the professionals you often meet when caring for your teeth and gums.
When you visit dental dentists at six monthly intervals, you receive a dental exam performed by the dentist. An experienced dentist will have the infrastructure and skills to perform a comprehensive exam of your mouth, teeth, gums, and the entire oral cavity to check for issues like cavities, gum disease, oral cancer, et cetera. The dentist also looks for potential problems in your mouth to offer suggestions for at-home care besides professional treatments to prevent teeth and gum deterioration.
Dentists do not merely look at your oral cavity but also consider your general health, which might exhibit indicators affecting your mouth. For example, acid reflux can result in enamel erosion making your teeth sensitive and needing treatments like dental bonding. When dentists detect such problems, they refer you to your healthcare provider for evaluation of acid reflux to request a remedy for the problem.
Every problem with your teeth and gums is not visible to the naked eye and sometimes needs x-rays for detection between your teeth or the jawbone. General dentists have the necessary infrastructure to take X-rays in the dental office, and many have invested in digital radiography to prevent exposing you to radiation. Therefore the x-rays enable dentists to view cavities between teeth early when preventive treatment helps resolve minor holes. Dental X-rays can also reveal life-threatening issues like oral cancer, allowing you to seek remedies from specialists like oncologists.
What Makes Dental Dentistry Visits Important?
When you visit general dentists for regular dental checkups, please do not consider the dental exam as the only benefit of your trip. After examining your teeth and oral cavity, the dentist asks the dental hygienist to give you teeth cleaning to ensure the elimination of dental plaque and tartar constantly forming on your teeth despite brushing and flossing.
While brushing and flossing are excellent for eliminating plaque and tartar, removing all debris is practically impossible. A speck of tartar between your teeth hardens within two days, becoming challenging to remove by cleaning your teeth daily. Tartar hardening on your teeth and beneath the gum line develops gum disease. If left untreated, it becomes a lifelong companion to require frequent treatments at high prices from Periodontists. Therefore when you visit a general dentist for six monthly checkups, you also benefit from a tooth cleaning that eliminates hardened tartar on your teeth and beneath the gum line to prevent the problem of gum disease from affecting you.
Besides performing dental plaque and tartar removal, the hygienist also polishes your teeth using a high-powered electric toothbrush with gritty toothpaste to remove any excess debris between your teeth and thoroughly polish them to ensure they appear brighter. In addition, you receive fluoride to strengthen tooth enamel and prevent cavities for several months after the teeth cleaning.
Your visit to the dentist near you does not end after the exam and cleaning because the professionals discuss excellent dental hygiene practices with you and provide information on how you can prevent dental problems from affecting you by limiting or avoiding certain foods and drinks, protecting your teeth by wearing mouthguards or other protective devices if affected by conditions like bruxism and offering advice on having a healthy diet to ensure your teeth get the minerals and vitamins needed to remain healthy.
The advice provided by the general dentist helps you maintain your dental health in optimal shape besides helping prevent issues with your overall health because dentists can identify problems in your mouth that might affect your general health to recommend early treatment before your condition worsens.
If you think general dentistry visits for optimal oral health are not essential, you will change your mind when you visit Tatnuck Family Dental Care for a routine exam. The visit will educate you on the importance of general dentistry to convince you never to neglect dental visits or delay them.
