A Great Smile Starts at Home
Maintaining your smile doesn’t start and stop when you visit our office. It’s a collaborative effort, both with your dental team and with you at home. We want to work together so you get the most out of every visit with us which means taking things you learn in-office and putting them in to practice at home. Below you will find just a number of examples how we make patient education our highest priority.
Is Your Toothbrush Doing Enough?
Did you know that the type of toothbrush you use does make a huge difference in your homecare? Hard or soft bristles, manual or electric, how often you change your toothbrush head; there are a lot of factors that can contribute to maintaining the health of your smile.
For most patients, the benefit of an electric toothbrush cannot be overstated. Whether its dexterity issues, crowding, maneuvering tight spaces, or excessive staining, an electric toothbrush takes care of most of the work of brushing for you. Even different brands or shapes of electric toothbrushes can change how effective your homecare is!
If you are looking to upgrade your homecare routine, our hygiene staff can offer tips, tricks and even recommendations as to which electric toothbrush is best for you; helping you find the best deals to improve your smile within any budget.
Facts About Floss
If there is one question you might get tired of hearing from your dentist, odds are its: “how often are you flossing?”
A 2018 survey found that only 37% of adults floss on a daily basis, meaning a majority of the adult population is neglecting a crucial step in their homecare routine!
Because our office emphasizes so much on homecare and building good dental habits, we want to make sure you’re not only keeping up the routine but also getting the most out of every step. That includes making sure you have the right tools, the right type of floss, and picking the right time to do it.
We get it, flossing is time consuming and at the end of the day, all you want to do is jump in bed and sleep. But without flossing, food and bacteria sits between your teeth all night long, leading to cavities and gum disease.
If you have difficulty flossing or sticking with a routine, our hygiene staff members are more than happy to help find what works best for you. Patient education is one of our favorite parts of the job so don’t be scared to ask!
Getting the Most Out of Your Fluoride
One of the easiest (and cheapest) ways you can care for your smile is by incorporating fluoride into your homecare routine. Fluoride is a natural occurring mineral which fights the bacteria that causes cavities and helps strengthen your teeth in a process called remineralization.
Most of us interact with fluoride on a regular basis, whether by brushing our teeth with fluoride toothpaste, using a fluoride mouth rinse, or by drinking fluorinated city water. But did you know that the sequence of steps in your homecare routine might be sabotaging your fluoride use?
Think about it, fluoride doesn’t just clean our teeth when we brush or make our breath minty fresh with a mouse rinse, it’s an anti-cavity agent that works overtime to strengthen tooth enamel. If we are rinsing with water at the end of our homecare routine, we rinse away all of that valuable fluoride! Yes, your teeth are clean from stains and plaque, but there’s so much more that fluoride can be doing while we’re sleeping or even going throughout your day.
Next time you brush your teeth, try spitting out your toothpaste without rinsing with water. Or, if you absolutely cannot stand the taste or feeling of toothpaste, try rinsing with an alcohol-free fluoride mouth rinse such as ACT. Just make sure the back of the bottle has fluoride listed as an ingredient as most mouth rinses that claim to be “anti-bacterial” don’t actually contain fluoride!
If you’re someone who needs to rinse after they floss, try flossing before brushing your teeth. Not only is it easier to build that daily flossing habit, but now fluoride can flow in those areas between your teeth that were otherwise blocked by food or plaque.
The same can be recommended if you’re experiencing sensitivity. Toothpaste specifically marketed towards reducing sensitivity should be the last step in your cleaning process. Make sure it has the added ingredient of potassium nitrate to get the most sensitivity-fighting boost (we recommend Sensodyne Pro-Enamel).
Our office carries a variety of toothpaste options to choose from including prescription strength fluoride toothpaste and even samples of fluoride mouth rinse, so if you ever want to try out a new brand or need a travel-size version to keep in your suitcase, let us know!
The benefits of fluoride cannot be understated. If you have any questions, interested in learning more homecare tips, or ready to step into your best smile, our passionate hygiene team is ready and excited to help.
Protecting Your Smile with a Nightguard
Whether we know it or not, we put our teeth and jaw through a lot on a day-to-day basis. Talking, eating, even when we’re just sitting on our phones or reading, we can put a lot of tension on our bodies even without realizing it.
During the day, it can be easy enough to manage; breathing, remembering to relax your shoulders and jaw, putting the phone down, etc. But what about when we’re sleeping? Clenching and grinding (known in dentistry as bruxism) can cause jaw pain, headaches, tooth sensitivity, and can even lead to broken fillings or teeth and what’s worse is that it can happen without you knowing!
That’s why we recommend protecting your smile with a custom nightguard. Over-the-counter options are good, but might only address half of the problem or can create new ones!
Most dental insurances are even getting on board with covering nightguards as they can see the benefit from preventing problems before they become fillings or crowns!
All it takes is a quick appointment with our 3D scanner technology and we’ll have a custom nightguard made specifically for you.