Visit Our Dentist Office Regularly For Great Results

Consistent dentist visits are literally your best friend when it comes to keeping dental diseases at bay and ensuring that your teeth are in the best condition ever. This is because as a trained dentist, we are in the best position to evaluate and maintain your teeth in a manner that does not allow decay or other diseases to creep in and affect your oral health. For years, we have been teaching our patients that the frequency they should be coming in to see us is once every six months. When you come in to see your dentist every six months, two things happen. First, we perform a full examination that allows us to find any budding problems long before they have a chance to take hold and become serious issues. Once we find a challenge, we treat it and remove it so that it never has a chance to cause you discomfort. The second thing we do is to clean your teeth and remove any excess plaque. Plaque buildup is one of the leading causes of decay and cavities, so keeping your plaque levels down helps with oral health. It is for this reason that a dentist will always remind you to come in after six months and encourage you to make these appointments ahead of time.

Unfortunately, there has been a trend in this country going the opposite direction. Recently, a study of appointments between 2002 and 2012 showed that the number of people coming in to see their dentist at least once every year has dropped instead of going up. In 2002, the percentage of people who had a minimum of one appointment in a 12 month period was 44.5%. By 2012, this had dropped to 42.1%. This is cause for concern and so we are encouraging all our patients to remember that prevention is far easier than cure. Recent data from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) has found that 27.5% of Americans suffer from untreated decay or cavities. In children between the ages of 12 and 15, the ratio is around 50%. This means that anywhere from 1 in 4 to 1 in 2 people, depending on the age they are, could be suffering from untreated decay. In addition to this, 14% of adults in the US reveal that their teeth are either in poor or bad condition, often because they do not visit the dentist regularly. Coming in bi-annually can help you avoid these challenges or from becoming one of the statistics.

Perhaps one of the most important things your dentist will do during the visit is to screen you for oral cancer. Over the years, medical science has come to realize that there is no one positioned quite as well to screen for oral cancer, and catch the initial symptoms of oral cancer, than a dentist. Since we are already examining your mouth, a dentist often can catch the lesions that occur in the mouth or in the throat as the first symptoms of oral cancer. Caught early and treated aggressively, oral cancer has a very good chance of being cured completely.

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