Dental Health
At Advanced Dental, we are a full-service dental practice. From fillings to sealants, we can help bring you to optimum dental health. Like anything else, it is so much easier to and less expensive to prevent issues with regular maintenance than to treat a problem. Our patients who schedule checkups regularly and take care of their dental health before they have an issue rarely have dental emergencies. Of course, emergencies happen, and when they do, we’ve got you. But if you can get into a routine of good dental health practices, you’ll find dental emergencies to be rare occurrences.
Good dental health practices include brushing and flossing daily, using fluoride products, making and keeping recommended dental checkups and x-rays, and completing recommended dental treatment. Here are some of the dental health services we offer every day.
Fillings
Fillings are done to remove decay, and replace the affected tooth structure. It is called a filling because new material fills the hole that decay left. Nowadays most teeth are treated with bonded tooth colored composite resin fillings. Caught early enough, cavities can be treated easily and painlessly. If not treated, decay can lead to tooth pain and/or infection, and the tooth would need root canal treatment or extraction.
Sealants
This is used to fill in narrow grooves in a tooth that cannot be adequately cleaned by brushing. In some cases, the tooth structure has fine grooves or pits which accumulate plaque, not because the person doesn’t brush, but because they’re too narrow to allow even one bristle into them. These will develop cavities over time, and you don’t want that. So on teeth that have no decay nor restorations on them, the dentist will brush on a coating that seals the grooves and pits, making it possible to brush off all the plaque and keep your teeth healthy.
X-Rays
This is a focused beam of X-Ray particles through bone which produces an image on special film, showing the structure through which it passed. This gives the familiar black and white images that doctors and dentists use to diagnose problems. X-rays are a necessary part of the diagnostic process, and not to use them could lead to undiagnosed disease. Without an X-ray of the whole tooth, and supporting bone and gum tissues, there is no real way to detect infection or pathology that requires attention.
Non-Surgical Gum Treatments
The gums, ligaments, and bone around the teeth form the foundation for teeth. When these structures (periodontium) are not healthy, it jeopardizes the teeth just as a bad foundation would threaten the stability of a house. Signs of unhealthy periodontium (gum disease) may be: gums that are red and bleed easily, persistent bad breath, gums that are pulled away from the tooth, loose teeth, and changes in the position or bite of the teeth. With proper care, however, it may be possible to return them to a healthy state. This is where appropriate gum treatments come in. The treatment usually involves a deep cleaning or root planing done under a local anesthetic, along with local antibiotic agents. If the gum disease is too severe it may need to be treated through surgery or extraction. This is why it is important to get it treated at the first sign of a problem.