Tag: best dentist litchfield

Teeth cleaning is one of the components of maintaining oral hygiene, which involves removing food particles and dental plaque from your teeth in order to reduce the risk of getting cavities, gum disease, bad breath, and other oral issues. Cleaning your teeth at home using good brushing technique and flossing can help to prevent most oral issues. But it is also important to visit a dentist at least every six months for professional cleaning and the removal of hardened deposits known as tartar that cannot be removed through regular brushing. 

Why Get Professional Teeth Cleaning?

Your mouth is exposed to a myriad of health risks unlike other parts of the body. Besides the helpful and unhelpful bacteria living in your mouth, you’re exposed to other dangers in the food and drinks you consume. You need to take special care of this environment to avoid any problems. Daily brushing and flossing help to remove plaque on the surface of your teeth, while professional teeth cleaning removes tartar (hardened plaque). This prevents the buildup of harmful bacteria in your mouth that may lead to decay, gum disease, and other oral and body issues. 

Since your mouth contains harmful bacteria and useful bacteria, your immune system is actively fighting the harmful bacteria to prevent it from causing harm. Professional teeth cleaning helps to prevent the buildup of bacteria to such an extent that it overwhelms your immune system and causes disease. Once the buildup of plaque and tartar is uncontrollable, it causes gum inflammation and bleeding, which is known as periodontal disease. If left untreated, the severity of gum disease can lead to tooth loss and the infection spreading to other parts of your body through the bloodstream. This increases the risk of diabetes going out of control, as well as heart disease, stroke, and dementia. 

Final Note 

Fortunately, most oral issues are treatable if prompt remedial action is taken as soon as the problem is identified. This is why you should visit your dentist in Litchfield MN for oral checkup and cleaning every six months. 

Six-month preventive dental visits are important for not only ensuring your long-term dental health but also reducing the risk of emergencies. These visits typically involve professional teeth cleaning to remove tartar (hardened plaque) that may contribute to dental issues such as decay, gum disease, and bad breath, among others. 

Oral Exam

Most hygienists perform the oral evaluation before teeth cleaning, as it may reveal that you need a full-mouth debridement (cleaning above and below the gums), as opposed to standard teeth cleaning of the exposed part of the teeth (above the gumline). During a routine oral evaluation, you can expect:

• Physical assessment of the state of your mouth. This involves an evaluation of your teeth, tongue, lips, mouth, jaws.  
• Periodontal probing – checking gum health by physical examination and measuring your gum pockets
• X-rays are not necessary during routine dental cleaning. But your dentist may recommend them to assess the extent of decay inside or between affected teeth. Depending on the results, you may need to schedule for scaling and root planing in addition to teeth cleaning. 

Professional Teeth Cleaning 

After the examination, the dental hygienist will clean your teeth using special tools to remove tartar, through a process known as scaling. Next, the teeth will be polished using a gritty paste. This process is used to remove any surface stains. Finally, the hygienist uses dental floss to clean the area between your teeth. 

Additional services may be necessary to ensure your optimal dental health, such as:

• Gingival irrigation – It involves spraying a stream of medicated water in the problem areas to remove bacteria hiding in areas that are hard to reach with a toothbrush or dental floss to remove foot debris and accumulated bacteria. This helps to reduce the size of gum pockets and improves your overall oral health. 
• Fluoride varnish – The dentist may recommend fluoride treatment to remineralize teeth with severely thin tooth enamel, to manage hypersensitivity caused by thinning enamel, or to prevent decay. 

Keep in mind that your oral health is connected with your overall health. So during your dental exam, the Litchfield hygienist can identify the signs of certain medical conditions and diseases, such as nutritional deficiencies, diabetes, hormonal irregularities, and so on, and recommend the appropriate action to help manage them and correct the problem.