Visiting a dentist for regular professional cleanings is vital to having healthy teeth and gums, says Dr. Kirk Petersen, DMD, who runs Hemet West Dental Office in Hemet, California. And these days, dentists not only clean but also provide information about nutrition, home-care maintenance, and even early mouth cancer detection.
The truth is that most patients only brush their teeth, and tend to use dental floss sporadically only to get the food out from between their teeth. But the fact is that brushing by itself only gets off about 65% of the plaque and bacteria that is on the teeth. And so that is like only washing 65% of your body, and never washing from the hips down.
And so getting a professional dental cleaning every three to six months, depending on your gum condition, helps to remove that 35% that eventually hardens into tartar, which is similar to the barnacles on a ship hull. It’s that tartar which can cause cavities and other problems in your mouth, including gum disease.
When our patients come to us for a thorough cleaning, we provide a variety of treatments, including:
- Tooth brushing and flossing instructions
- Nutritional assessment, if needed
- Periodontal charting and cleaning
- Tooth scaling, if needed
- Fluoride treatments
- Tooth polishing
- Early detection of mouth cancer
Mouth Cancer
Helping patients prevent oral cancer is an important part of a dentist’s job. Whenever we do a cleaning and a check-up, we screen patients for oral cancer, which makes up about 5% of all cancers, if you take out skin cancer. It’s a lot more prevalent than people realize.
And also the five-year survival rate is only about 50% with oral cancer, and that really has not changed in the last 40 or 50 years. The main reason that it hasn’t changed it because oral cancer is often discovered when it is too late to do anything about it.
Keeping Whole Body Healthy
Another reason to see your dentist for regular checkups and cleanings is to keep your whole body healthy. This is especially important ever since the medical profession discovered a link between gum disease and heart disease and Alzheimer’s, lung disease, diabetes and pancreatic cancer.
Seeing a dentist regularly also help us to find simple problems and cavities earlier. So they are cheaper and easier to solve and treat. And it also prevents bad breath, which is often caused by sulphur gasses that the bacteria in the mouth give off.
The information in the article is not intended to substitute for the medical expertise and advice of your healthcare provider. We encourage you to discuss any decisions about treatment or care with an appropriate healthcare provider.
