PARENTS CAN DO a few different things to give their kids’ smiles a healthy start.
1. Find an Effective Toothbrush They Like
It should have soft, polished bristles and be the right size for their hands and mouths, but otherwise, they might like one with their favorite cartoon character on it. Make sure to replace it when the bristles fray!
2. Prevent Cavities With Sealants
Sealants are recommended by the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, particularly for kids with a history of tooth decay already. They greatly reduce the risk of childhood tooth decay.
3. Provide Teeth-Friendly Snacks Like Fruit and Cheese
Whole or sliced fruit is a great mouth-healthy snack because the fibers help scrub the teeth clean. Cheese is a good source of calcium and stimulates saliva production. (We need saliva for neutralizing harmful acids and clearing away food debris.)
4. Manage Expectations for Whitening Toothpaste
As much as we would all love having pearly-white teeth, make sure the teens know that whitening toothpaste only contains abrasives and polishing agents to remove surface stains, not deeper ones or white spots.
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.
AS A PARENT, maybe you spend a lot of your time worrying about whether your child’s teeth will develop cavities. Obviously, it’s critical to teach them how to brush and floss and encourage them to do so daily, but there’s something else that can help prevent childhood tooth decay: dental sealants.
The Battle Between Your Child’s Teeth and Bacteria
40% of children develop cavities by the time they begin school. This is a result of poor oral hygiene and frequent consumption of sugary drinks and snacks, and it’s why it’s so important to help them build strong oral health habits at an early age. The human mouth contains many species of bacteria, some of which consume the leftover sugar on our teeth and then excrete acid onto them. As tough as tooth enamel is, it’s very vulnerable to acid, so this causes tooth decay.
The ways we keep oral bacteria in check are brushing, flossing, and limiting our sugar intake. Even then, there are still crevices in our teeth where bacteria can hide, particularly for a child who doesn’t have the dexterity yet to brush as effectively. That’s where dental sealants come in.
What Exactly Are Dental Sealants?
Dental sealants are simply a layer of clear plastic that can be brushed onto the chewing surfaces of teeth in order to “seal them off” from cavity-causing plaque and bacteria. Dentists have been using sealants since the 1960s. They’ve been popular for so long due to how effective they are, as they reduce the risk of childhood tooth decay in the back teeth by up to 80%!
Sealants are typically applied to the molars because they do the most chewing and have deep crevices where bacteria can hide. Sealants fill in and cover these crevices and act as a shield against bacteria. Even better, the application process is so quick and painless that we can do it in the course of a normal appointment!
When Is the Right Time for Sealants?
As soon as your child’s adult molars erupt, they can be protected by sealants. That will usually be around age six. The earlier the sealants are in place, the less chance oral bacteria has to build up on the chewing surfaces of their molars. But the window doesn’t close if your child is older than six and doesn’t have sealants left; they’re still beneficial if they get them later. Even adults can get sealants!
Schedule Your Child’s Next Checkup Today!
Whether your child needs a normal twice-yearly cleaning and checkup or you’d like them to get sealants, go ahead and schedule the next appointment. If you have any concerns about their brushing or flossing or questions about how what they’re eating could be affecting their dental health, just let us know and we can help.
Protecting your child’s smile is our top priority!
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.
THERE ARE SO many choices of toothpaste in our grocery stores. With an entire aisle of toothpaste options to choose from, we want to help our patients narrow things down a little based on their individual dental health needs.
Whitening Toothpaste
Choose a whitening toothpaste to remove surface stains, but remember that it can’t change a tooth’s natural color or fight deeper stains. Whitening toothpaste contains abrasives to polish the teeth and peroxide to break down surface stains. Using it twice a day can lead to visible results after several weeks, but make sure to look for the ADA Seal of Acceptance!
Orthodontic patients should wait until Braces Off Day before using whitening products, toothpaste included so that they don’t end up with patches of different colors where the brackets were.
For Sensitive Teeth
Over-the-counter tooth sensitivity toothpaste is a good option for patients with sensitive teeth. It helps rebuild enamel and minimize discomfort, and if the over-the-counter type isn’t enough, the dentist can prescribe a stronger toothpaste.
Popular Inactive Ingredients?
What about ingredients like activated charcoal or aloe vera? There is little evidence to support the benefits these toothpastes claim to offer. Charcoal in particular is abrasive and may actually damage tooth enamel and make teeth more sensitive. Toothpaste with these ingredients also tends to lack fluoride, which helps rebuild tooth enamel.
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.
PEOPLE HAVE BEEN getting cavities as long as there have been people, and people before modern dentistry had some strange theories about what was causing them. A popular one believed around the world for thousands of years was the idea of “tooth worms.”
Ancient Sumeria Got the Tooth Worms Ball Rolling
As far back as 5000 B.C., tooth worms were listed in Sumerian texts as being a reason for tooth decay. They’re also mentioned in ancient Chinese scripts from 1500 B.C. in text carved from bone. People in the Roman Empire and medieval Europe also believed in tooth worms, which were said to gnaw at the teeth and live in the gums and cavities.
Why Was the Tooth Worms Theory So Common?
There are a few theories about why people all over the world believed cavities were caused by tooth worms:
Guinea worms in drinking water, which people would have seen and may have incorrectly connected to tooth problems
The worm-like structures of dental roots, which could be mistaken for worms by people who didn’t know better
Henbane seed treatments, in which a person would inhale the fumes of burned henbane seeds. Ironically, the ash of the burned seeds looks like worms, and the plant’s narcotic effects would relieve tooth pain. People may have drawn the wrong conclusions.
Other Cavity Myths
Over the ages, people have attributed cavities to a variety of other causes:
Chemical agents
Defective saliva
Inflammed jaw bones
Sudden changes in temperature
Injuries (this one can be true; a tooth cracked by injury is vulnerable to infection)
How Cavities Actually Form
Thanks to modern dentistry, we know that the culprit behind tooth decay isn’t worms but dental plaque, which is a mixture of bacteria, acids, and food debris mixed with saliva. As it builds up, it erodes the outer layer of a tooth, creating tiny holes called cavities. If the bacteria reach the pulp at the center of the tooth, the tooth will become infected and possibly abscessed, which involves swelling and severe tooth pain.
How to Prevent Cavities
Far from the henbane treatments of old, as modern dental health professionals, we can recommend good dental hygiene habits that will actually help prevent cavities, including:
Twice-daily brushing with a soft-bristled toothbrush and a fluoride toothpaste
Daily flossing (use floss picks or a water flosser if traditional floss is difficult for you)
Limiting your sugar intake (especially from soda and fruit juice, which are loaded with sugar and acid)
Scheduling regular dental cleanings and exams
What’s the Takeaway?
As fun as it is to learn about old, debunked dental health practices, the takeaway is that tooth worms are a myth. Dentists have known this for centuries, and we know the real causes of tooth decay that we should avoid and fight against. Keeping up with your daily dental hygiene habits and dentist visits twice a year are the best ways to protect your oral health.
We love helping our patients maintain healthy smiles!
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.
MOST MEDICATIONS come with a list of possible side effects, including side effects that impact oral health. These side effects are common even when the medications have nothing to do with your teeth or gums, so it’s helpful to know what you can do to balance necessary medications with maintaining a healthy smile.
Oral Chemistry and Medicine
Some medications and even some vitamins are actually directly harmful to our teeth. This is particularly common with children’s medication because they tend to come in the form of sugary syrups and multivitamins designed to be like candy. Sugar is the favorite food of harmful oral bacteria, which will then excrete acid on the teeth.
Adult medications are most often in pill form so they don’t interact with the teeth or gums, but something like an inhaler can lead to oral thrush (irritating or painful patches of white fungus that grow on the roof of the mouth, the inside of the cheeks, and the tongue). Adults and children can take preventative measures against this kind of side effects. It can be as simple as rinsing with water after taking these medications or vitamins or after using an inhaler.
Indirect Effects of Medicine on Oral Health
Even pills that make it past the mouth without any direct harm to the teeth can cause mouth-related side effects. For example, blood thinners can leave gum tissue more vulnerable to bleeding while brushing and flossing. Inflammation of the gums is a common side effect that increases the risk of gum disease.
Whether the medications are prescribed or over-the-counter, the most common oral side effect is dry mouth, which can lead to a wide range of other oral health issues. When there isn’t enough saliva in the mouth, it makes chewing and swallowing more difficult, even uncomfortable, and it leaves the teeth and gums more vulnerable to oral bacteria. It can even make it more difficult to taste food!
Other Ways Medicine Can Impact Oral Health
Osteoporosis drugs have in rare cases been associated with compromised bone tissue in the jaw, increasing the risk of tooth loss and gum recession. Some medications cause changes to the sense of taste even when they don’t cause any real harm, typically with a strange metallic or bitter aftertaste that lingers.
Talk to the Dentist And Your Doctor About Your Side Effects
Always make sure to keep your health care professionals in the know when you’re experiencing side effects, and that includes your dentist when the side effects are impacting your mouth. Sometimes it is possible to change prescriptions or alter the dosage to minimize a side effect, but that can only happen if the doctor knows what’s happening.
The dentist is always a great resource for your oral health concerns!
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.
A PACIFIER OR THUMB/finger-sucking habit that lasts beyond the toddler years can have a negative impact on a child’s teeth and jaws.
A Healthy Self-Soothing Habit
In infancy and toddlerhood, these are perfectly healthy self-soothing habits. They help the child feel happy and safe when encountering a new or stressful experience (which happens frequently, as everything they encounter is new to them). The benefits of pacifiers or thumbsucking are many, both for the babies themselves and for their parents.
When It Stops Being Healthy
However, after a certain age, continuing these habits can change the way the developing adult teeth will come in. It can even change the shape of their dental arches. Most children will grow out of the habit on their own by age 4. If they aren’t showing any signs of stopping by then, it could be time to intervene.
Ways to Discourage the Habit
With pacifiers, it can be as simple as taking it away or trimming it down until the child loses interest. Thumbsuckers can be trickier. Nasty-tasting topical aids are an option but they aren’t perfect. We recommend praising successes rather than scolding failures, giving them activities to keep their hands too busy for sucking, and putting socks over their hands to discourage thumbsucking at night.
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.
YOU MAY HAVE heard the insult “mouth-breather” in recent years thanks to the popularity of the show Stranger Things. There are actually many good health reasons to avoid breathing through your mouth if nose breathing is possible. We should consider mouth breathing an emergency backup, not our main way to breathe. In both the short term and the long term, mouth breathing has negative health effects.
The Short-Term Effects of Mouth Breathing
There are several negative effects of mouth breathing that kick in either immediately or very quickly. A major one is lower oxygen levels. When we breathe through our noses, we trigger nitric oxygen production, which helps our lungs absorb oxygen. Mouth breathing skips this process, making it harder to get the most out of each breath, resulting in less oxygen absorbed and less energy for mental and physical tasks. Other short-term effects include:
Impaired speech: when the mouth is always open, it can make certain sounds more difficult to say, particularly for children.
Lethargy, irritability, and inattention: getting less oxygen means sleeping worse and having a harder time focusing at work or school. This can seriously impact kids’ learning.
Dry mouth: breathing through the mouth, unsurprisingly, dries it out. This is a problem because saliva is the first line of defense against oral bacteria. We also need it to use our sense of taste effectively and speak clearly.
The Effects of Mouth Breathing Compound Over Time
The short-term effects are already unpleasant, but a mouth-breathing habit can lead to worse issues if it continues, including serious developmental effects for kids who grow up with this habit.
Increased likelihood of sleep apnea: this sleep disorder comes with a wide range of health complications of its own, including chronic diseases like diabetes and high blood pressure, as well as low energy, poor concentration, and a weakened immune system.
Altered facial development: when a child’s mouth is closed, their tongue exerts pressure on their dental arches, helping them to develop correctly. A mouth-breathing habit takes that pressure away and leads to narrower arches, flat features, drooping eyes, and a small chin.
More complex orthodontic problems: that altered facial development will often include a lot of dental crowding and other issues that require orthodontic treatment to correct.
Tooth decay and halitosis (chronic bad breath): over time, these are likely results of dry mouth. Saliva helps neutralize oral pH when we consume acidic foods or drinks or when harmful bacteria produce acid, so without saliva, we tend to have worse breath and become more susceptible to tooth decay.
It’s Time to Break the Mouth-Breathing Habit!
Some people breathe through their mouths because of a problem with regular nose-breathing, like a deviated septum or a sinus infection, but anyone who can comfortably breathe through their nose should try to do that as their default option. We’re happy to answer any questions you may have about mouth breathing and its impacts on oral health.
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.
IT’S NOT ACTUALLY true that it takes more muscles to frown than to smile; smiling takes at least ten muscles while frowning requires as few as six. We think the saying should be changed to “smile to burn more calories!” And that isn’t the only health benefit of smiling.
Smiling Releases Endorphins
We obviously smile when we’re happy, but studies have suggested that the mere act of smiling is enough to make us feel happier. The feeling of happiness and the physical action of smiling are so tied together in our brains that even a fake smile can release endorphins.
Smile to Relieve Stress
In the short term, endorphins reduce pain and relieve stress, functioning a lot like painkillers. Over time, the effects compound into health benefits like reducing our risk of getting cancer and becoming more resilient against illnesses. This is because when we are better at managing stress, our cells go through fewer stress-induced mutations.
Smile to Live Longer
In a lifetime of smiling, we might actually accrue enough health benefits from the cumulative endorphins to give ourselves longer lives. One thing that makes it easier to smile more is to be confident in our smiles, and that’s where professional dental care and diligent brushing and flossing come in.
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.
IN ONE OF HIS sonnets, Shakespeare described the reeking breath of his lady love, and the subject came up again in two of his plays. He sets a creepy mood with the “black contagious breath” of the night in “King John” and includes the line “his breath stinks with eating toasted cheese” in “Henry IV Part II.” Unfortunately, smelly breath was a common problem for that time period, and so were bad teeth.
The Class Divide of Early Modern Dental Health
Most people in Early Modern England were missing one or two teeth and they had to deal with a lot of cavities, but the problem was actually worse for the wealthy and especially the queen. Sugar was the hot new fad among the aristocracy in Elizabeth I’s day, but it was only available as an expensive import. In fact, sugar was so expensive that it was almost its own currency, and only the wealthy could afford it as an ingredient in their food.
Tooth-Rotting Luxury
Unfortunately for all those lords and ladies, they didn’t realize the dental health implications of luxurious sugar consumption. It wasn’t long until black teeth became a symbol of wealth, which gave rise to the perplexing fashion among the lower classes of artificially blackening their teeth to appear richer.
The Royal Teeth
Few felt the effects of sugar as much as Queen Elizabeth herself. The people around her knew better than to gossip about her appearance, but late in her life, one French ambassador is recorded to have said that her teeth were “very yellow and unequal,” and a German traveler went even further, describing “her teeth black (a fault the English seem to suffer from because of their great use of sugar).”
Despite her dental troubles, Elizabeth was terrified of dental treatment (or what passed for it back then). Before she was willing to undergo a tooth extraction, a bishop had to allow one of his own teeth to be pulled to prove it would be worth it. (To be fair, they didn’t have anesthesia available, so the prospect would have been much less pleasant than getting modern dental work.)
Dental Hygiene in the Elizabethan Era
What did the English do to try to keep their teeth healthy in that time period? They would use quills or wood for toothpicks and wash off plaque with a cloth. (We definitely prefer our modern toothbrushes.) If a tooth became too painful to tolerate, they could go to a surgeon to have it removed. If a surgeon was too expensive, a “tooth-drawer” or even a blacksmith could do it more cheaply.
However, some wealthy people were making matters worse for themselves by brushing their teeth with sugar paste:
For Our Teeth’s Sake, We’re Happy to Live in Modern Times
As fascinating as it is to look back on the history of dental health, it’s such a relief to live in a time when we get to enjoy the benefits of so much dental knowledge that we had to divide it into twelve different specialties, from endodontists to orthodontists to pediatric dentists and more. Make sure you’re scheduling regular appointments and keeping up with your dental hygiene habits!
Take advantage of the benefits of modern dentistry!
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.
A COUPLE OF the biggest rites of passage in childhood are the first baby teeth coming in and the first adult teeth coming in. We’re here to give parents a brief guide on the general timeline to follow.
The Baby Teeth Schedule
Baby teeth tend to arrive in pairs, alternating between the lower and upper arches. First up are the lower front teeth, usually between six and ten months. Next are the upper front teeth between eight and twelve months. Then come the lateral incisors, first bottom, then top. Then the first molars, then the canines, and finally the second molars.
By age three, most toddlers have all 20 of their baby teeth. A little late isn’t usually cause for concern, but we should take a look if there’s no sign of teeth by 18 months.
When Does the First Tooth Become Loose?
On average, age five or six is when kids start losing baby teeth. They might start feeling left behind by their peers if it takes longer. If they still aren’t loose by age seven, it’s time to see a dentist to discover the cause. In most cases, it’s nothing to worry about; late-blooming teeth actually tend to be more resistant to cavities than early ones!
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.
In my 57 years of life, Dr. Simon is the best dentist I’ve ever seen. We are a military family and have moved several (more than I care to count) times. With each move comes the same challenges relating to finding new doctors, dentists, etc. A good dentist is particularly hard to find, as they are f… Read more
Colleen Moore
Service is great, staff is knowledgeable and courteous. Highly recommended.
Roy Johnson Sr.
I recently went to visit Dr.Simon and was informed that I needed quite a bit of dental work, this came as a shock to me and I was of course very nervous. Dr.Simon and his staff were very kind and accommodating through the entire process. The work that he did was excellent, he takes pride in what he … Read more
Dr. Simon is very sincere and thorough. He takes the time necessary to explain the procedures, expected outcomes and future care. His compassionate approach with a healing hand to all orthotic procedures make him a well-trusted dental professional and an exemplary human-being.
I’ve been a patient of Dr. Simon for many years and he’s the best! I’m faithful about having a check-up every six months because Dr. Simon is always on time and very considerate. I like the Brandermill location and his staff is professional, friendly and courteous.
