Seeking health, rather than fighting disease

You need so much more than current preventive dentistry to achieve keeping your teeth for life. A different mindset or approach is required.

Current preventive dentistry is involved in early detection and treatment. And this is important. The fact is, no matter how good or bad your teeth are, nothing stays the same in your mouth. Just as your appearance changes through growth, adulthood and old age, so does the oral environment.

A small problem is easier and cheaper to fix than a big problem! But it seems wasteful to just keep patching the problem instead of resolving it. And we dentists know each replacement is one small step towards tooth loss.

So wouldn’t it be better to seek out health ?

Imagine the costs and trauma of dental treatment being  eliminated, for life !

So are you the sort of person where every visit to the dentist means a filling or two for you ?  We don’t consider that right.

The good news is our Teeth for Life program can change a ” bad teeth” lifetime history around for the better too. If you have a mouth full of fillings and gum disease, we can restore you to health first, then help you maintain it, seeking health !

A child brought in young enough to our program can expect to never need a filling, have healthy arches and straight teeth for life, and no gum disease. That is the most inexpensive dentistry over a lifetime you could hope for. 

Our “teeth for life” program is an ongoing process each year, it includes:

• Thorough assessment of past problems and provisional diagnosis of likely causes to determine your future risks.
• Early orthopedic assessment to detect possible bite problems, tongue habits, airway and breathing disorders that may affect sleep and learning.
• Complete prophylaxis and gum therapy.
• Home care assessment, review and education for good lifetime habits.
• Undoing some old destructive bad habits.
• Predicting possible psychosocial triggers to poor home care and undoing them.
• Cancer screening.
• Checking for detrimental oral habits.
• Laser detection systems  for earliest signs of decay.
• Digital radiographs for early detection.
• Education, motivation and understanding.
• Salivary screening.
• Special consideration of individuals’ needs so we can find a home care program they CAN do, rather than one they are SUPPOSED to do.
• Developing special home care programs for high risk patients.

Not everyone needs it all. But everyone benefits from screening our patients for all these needs, and it makes it so much more valuable than regular preventive care with little extra cost. Once again, clinician’s knowledge and skill provide the key, once our goals have been set.