PREVENTATIVE DENTISTRY

If there was one area of dentistry which we had to choose as our number one priority then it would be this one - providing dental treatment to prevent disease within and outside of the oral cavity before it has a chance to take hold. The old adage 'prevention is better than cure' is what we mean here. Most of the treatment we provide in dentistry today has a preventative aspect to it.

For example, when we emphasize the importance of 6 monthly dental checkups, we are emphasizing preventative dentistry, meaning that we offer you an opportunity to intercept and hopefully reverse disease within the oral cavity and elsewhere at a very early stage before it has a chance to cause serious damage, requiring, in many situations, expensive treatment.

A regular dental X-ray of back teeth is also good preventative dentistry. Without these X-rays we cannot reassure you that there is no decay hiding between your teeth because just by looking at your teeth we cannot see between them. Decay may go undiagnosed and such untreated decay may result in your teeth becoming infected, needing expensive root canal therapy and crown work or extraction and expensive replacement.

Another common example is when we point out the importance of replacing missing teeth. People can get used to any number of missing teeth, in fact people can get used to just about anything, but that does not mean that this is good for us. In reality, the opposite is true. Even when a single tooth is missing, there is a tendency for the adjacent and opposing teeth to move to try to close up the resulting space. This in turn opens up spaces between all other teeth with consequent food packing and plaque build up on the large apposing surfaces. In such a situation it does not take long for gum disease and decay to set in between these other teeth and, over a period of time, one may end up with the loss of multiple teeth.

The situation is even worse when multiple teeth have been missing for some time. In addition to the above scenario, one also has to contend with the fact that the remaining teeth are being used to take the forces of the missing teeth as well, for which they were not designed. As a result they wear out much quicker than their destined lifespan. It has been shown that the loss of a single molar tooth reduces chewing efficiency by about 10%. A further problem with missing teeth is that the bite is often disrupted as people try to chew their food with their remaining teeth, such as the front teeth. In that situation we not only wear out these front teeth very quickly but we also wear out our jaw joints after shifting the lower jaw from its normal comfortable chewing position. Damaged, arthritic jaw joints can be very debilitating and in such situations are perfectly preventable, similarly to further tooth loss and tooth wear, by having missing teeth replaced promptly.