Dentistry Expensive?

Is Dentistry Expensive?

Oral health. Is it expensive or not? The answer is that oral health is not expensive. Oral disease on the other hand is very expensive, affects quality of life, and can literally be life threatening.
Oral health:  Six toothbrushes per year, $25.  Six tubes of toothpaste per year, $25.  Four 50 yard boxes of dental floss per year, $20.  For a professional to monitor your oral health, coach you in areas indicated and polish your teeth too if you are a smoker or heavy coffee drinker, a dental check up with x-rays is about $210.  If you are high-risk for oral disease (smokers and sugar addicts) a second check up each year without X-rays is about $160.  Grand total, $440 if you are the high-risk patient.  That is less than you'll pay for the insurance/benefit policy.

Dental disease on the other hand is very expensive.  One small cavity will nearly double your annual dental professional cost.  Dental disease can easily cost a person $100,000 over her/his adult years if the disease, "caries," is not controlled.
What can you do?

1. Be an effective tooth brusher.  Have you learned from your dental professional how to measure your own effectiveness brushing your own teeth?  Most people spend too much time and are not effective.  Be able to check how well you have cleaned your teeth any day.  You can check our website.http://www.thisismytownusa.com/winning-with-smiles.php#contact_us

2. Be a Flosser.  The toothbrush cannot clean between your teeth and under bridges.  Most people don't floss and over 70% of all dental treatment is due to problems between the teeth.  100% of your gum disease problems will start between your teeth.
3. Get the sugar out.  In the last 40 years the average American's consumption of sugar has increased by 7 times.  Eat wisely!

4. Control the snack frequency.  If the teeth have long rest periods between meals, they can re-mineralize (heal) themselves.  Today's habits of sipping, sucking on hard candies, chewing sweet gums or popping those little mints is ruining teeth faster than anything in history.  If you chew gum or pop mints, choose ones sweetened with 100% xylitol, a long proven inhibitor of cavity formation.

Beverage sippers.  Beverages have so many problems for your health, I have an entire essay on my website devoted to them.  Just choose water.

Need more information, click HERE for Winning with Smiles.com

Contagious Cavities?

Contagious cavities

Mom’s oral health foretells her children's oral health!

Most people recognize that cavity problems seem to run in families. Most people also shrug and say "I have soft teeth, it runs in the family," as if they cannot do anything about it. That is wrong. Research has never demonstrated soft teeth. Research has definitely demonstrated the bacteria that cause cavities are contagious and we usually get ours from our caretakers when we are infants and first growing teeth.

If a family has aggressive cavity causing bacteria, they are typically traded to the infant at those cuddly slobbery and spoon sharing times. But, please do not stop being cuddling nurturing parents. There is another way! The contagious disease is dose dependent. Research has shown that cleaning up mom and dad's oral health before baby is born, or at least before infant teeth show up, is an excellent way to reduce bacterial count and improve outcomes for baby. By the way, this includes improving odds for full-term pregnancy.

A good way to start would be a dental checkup. However, by "cleaning up oral health" I don't mean necessarily getting those expensive cavities filled, though that obviously helps too. Immediate and inexpensive, or even free things people can do are:

1. Become a truly effective tooth brusher. Use disclosing tools (tablets, solutions, or kitchen food color) to show you the bacteria. Then teach yourself how to thoroughly clean your teeth. Check yourself every couple weeks until you are confident you have figured it out. Most people find they can thoroughly clean their teeth in about half the time they used to.

2. Become a flosser. Between teeth is a place the toothbrush cannot reach. Getting the bacteria out each day will reduce the cavity causing bacteria significantly over time and improve the odds for your baby.

3. If you are a gum chewer or mint popper, choose gum and mints with Xylitol as the first ingredient and preferably the only sweetener. Xylitol inhibits the acid producing capacity of cavity causing bacteria. That helps you. By doing this it also reduces survival of these bacteria, leading to fewer of these type bacteria in your saliva. That helps your baby!

4. Stop sipping sodas and sweetened beverages between meals. Even the diet drinks which don't have sugar to feed bacteria do have high acid levels and cavity causing bacteria thrive in an acid environment.

5. Don't rinse the toothpaste off after you brush. Just spit. Giving the fluoride in that residual toothpaste taste more time will make stronger enamel faster. If you have unfilled cavities it will also be more effective in those holes resisting the growth of the cavities.

Caretakers with clean mouths and good oral health practices pass on fewer detrimental bacteria to their babies. If you are not taking care of your baby during the day, who is? Has your child's caretaker had a good dental checkup lately? What are your child's caretaker’s oral health habits?

Good oral health for your baby begins long before your baby has teeth. When your baby does have teeth, be sure to create a good relationship with a dental professional before cavities have a chance to begin. The first tooth deserves a dental home.

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Plaque-The Weak Link

Plaque-The Weak Link

If we are going to stop dental disease, let's target the weak link. We need four ingredients to create a cavity. A tooth, some bacteria (plaque), food for the bacteria, and time for the bacteria to make the hole.

So, eliminating the tooth would be an undesirable way to prevent cavities. Food is essential to life, although we have a lot to do in bringing the American diet back to healthful. We obviously are not going to eliminate simple carbohydrate from our diet. The only way I know to eliminate time from the equation is also an undesirable option. That leaves the bacteria as the easiest ingredient to target.

Plaque research has identified and described this incredibly complex organization of 600+ different kinds of bacteria called plaque. With over 600 different bacteria, it is impossible to create a vaccine or anti-biotic that can wipe it out. Because of the defense mechanisms developed by this complex organization of bacteria, it is also impossible to create vaccines or antibiotics that will target specific groups of bacteria within the plaque. However, the very complexity of the plaque becomes its weakness when we are preventing cavities. We merely need to disturb the organization, the village as it were, and it has to rebuild and reorganize before it can concentrate acid to dissolve holes in our teeth. Cleaning teeth does not remove bacteria from the mouth, it gets the plaque off the teeth and this disorganizes it.

It then takes plaque a minimum of 24 hours to reorganize and begin concentrating acid again. Your teeth are "safe" for 24 hours. Think of your job as scrambling the bacteria off your teeth. You don't need a new section of floss between each tooth because you are just scrambling it off your teeth.

All you need is a way to "see" the plaque so you can teach yourself a fast and efficient way to clean your teeth daily. See our website or blog about disclosing bacteria. Thoroughly effective tooth and gums cleaning can be as little as 2 min. each day. One good effective tooth cleaning each day will protect you for 24 hours.

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The Cavity

The Cavity

What is it? - How does it happen?

A cavity, very simply is a hole. The body "cavity" of the Thanksgiving turkey is what you fill with stuffing. A cavity in a tooth is a hole. It is made by the bacteria of the contagious disease "caries."
In order to have a dental cavity we need four ingredients. A tooth, the right bacteria, food for the bacteria (simple carbohydrate) and some time for the bacteria to make the hole. The variety of bacteria responsible for caries thrive on simple carbohydrate (sugars and cooked starches) and grow to form a complex biofilm of 600+ different species of bacteria. This takes time, 24 hours. (Note: If you clean those bacteria off your teeth, your teeth are safe for 24 hours) That biofilm then generates acids that can dissolve calcium out of the teeth, weakening the tooth structure and eventually making the hole. This takes time too, months.

During this process the affected area slowly turns chalky white as the enamel softens. As the white lesion progresses, it gets porous enough that stain from food or bacteria begins to penetrate and the white lesion darkens to brown.

Finally, the structure gets soft enough that pieces chip out and parts dissolve away leaving the hole. Note also, before the enamel collapses the bacteria and acids have penetrated to the softer inner portion of the tooth where the cavity grows faster. When the enamel finally collapses, we find the cavity inside the tooth is much larger than the hole in the enamel. Picture if you will an inverted mushroom with the narrow stem as the hole in the enamel and the large cap of the mushroom is the larger hole inside the tooth.

Cavities take time to develop though the collapse of the enamel may seem like an overnight event. Important; in the early stages of the disease, when calcium is being lost, but the integrity of the enamel still exists, the decay process can be stopped and even reversed. We would love to show you how. Also remember, cavities start on the outside of your teeth. Cleaning a cavity and filling it can stop the cavity from creating an abscess. However, filling the cavity does nothing to stop the disease from creating another cavity in a new place. Stopping the disease can only be done by you at home. And filling the cavity will never restore the lost integrity and strength of the tooth.

Lets prevent holes in your teeth

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Your Smile: Healthy and Beautiful!

Your Smile

Healthy and Beautiful

Take the time to look at what shows in a smile. Look at your own. Look when it is a big smile and when it is a quiet private smile. Look at photographs you like. There is a huge variety of smiles and everyone's is unique. They typically include the teeth and some gums and lips.

My experience is most people brush their back teeth better than front teeth. Seems surprising, right? It turns out the wrist and arm coordination is much more difficult for front teeth. It is also easier for lips to interfere with toothbrushes than for cheeks to interfere. That means that typically the tooth brush does not reach the gum line of the front teeth. The result is that more yellow and brown stain develops on front teeth, more gums are red, swollen and bleeding (yuck) around front teeth, and more tartar buildup occurs on front teeth. This is not good for your smile. 
Properly cleaning and flossing your front teeth will give you whiter teeth, tight pink (not red) healthy gums, no more bleeding, and the important gum shape that displays the beautiful contours of healthy teeth.

Take a look!

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Scott Thompson, DDS
Winning With Smiles – Pediatric Dentistry

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

How much .. Where is it?

I am a dentist, and I keep telling my patients, their families and my friends.  "Sugar, it is not just about the cavities."  Cavities are just the beginning of the damage to your body.  Of far greater importance is the damage it causes to your metabolic systems in your body.

It is toxic.  Recently, Dr Gupta aired an expose on "60 minutes."  Your web search engine will find it, so look at it.  Far more convincing will be to go to u-tube and watch the 90 minute lecture given by Dr Robert Lustig from University of California San Francisco entitled "Sugar: the Bitter Truth."  All calories are not the same!  Excess sugar is more harmful to you than excess fat!  Look at these videos and see for yourself.

Sugar is addictive.  Yes, just like cocaine, sugar stimulates the area of the brain that tells you "I like this."  It drives you to seek more.  As you eat more, it develops tolerance (just like it does for cocaine) so as satisfaction decreases it drives you to consume more to achieve the same level of satisfaction.  Just like cocaine and methamphetamine!  The result?  You eat more and more sugar, gain more and more weight, suffer more and more heart disease and diabetes, and more recent research is indicating higher cancer rates!

And sugar destroys.  You all know it is a key factor in the destruction of teeth.  MORE IMPORTANT it destroys livers.  Specifically fructose (half of your normal table sugar and corn syrup) metabolism in the liver not only creates by products that cause harm in organ systems in your body, it also causes fatty liver degeneration.  When your liver fails your whole body will fail.

So where is the sugar in your diet?  I was in high school, college and dental school through the 1960s.  The average American ate 30 grams of sugar each day.  The average American today is eating 200 grams of sugar!  How could that be?  It has been a slow insidious process over a couple generations.  When I was in college, a cup of coffee, teaspoon of sugar and a donut would have netted a total of 150 calories.  In today's culture, 2 generations later, a small coffee mocha and a scone at Starbucks will net you 650 calories.  In the 1960s a great dessert at a restaurant was homemade apple pie, 420 calories of decadence, ha ha. Today a single slice of raspberry cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory will net you 1530 calories.  In the 1950s & 1960s I had a soda or other sweet beverage about twice a month.It was 7 or 8 ounces with about 20 grams of sugar.  Today, take the lowest calorie beverage sold in the stores, Vitamin Water, in what is considered a small to medium bottle, 20oz, and it has 33 grams of sugar in the one bottle.  That is more sugar than the average American ate in an entire day in the 1960s!  The average person is drinking 2 or 3 beverages a day!!  My bowl of breakfast cereal in the 1950s had one teaspoon of sugar  sprinkled on it (my mother allowed that).  There were no presweetened cereals.  Today the cereals marketed for kids have 3 times that in a bowl.  Your Catsup has 22% sugar in it (to appeal to that pleasure center in the brain).  Sugars are added to most processed foods at a level that does not necessarily taste sweet like a desert, but is enough to enhance the flavor and stimulate that addiction receptor in the brain.  It makes you want more.

This is not going to be easy.  If you are going to improve your health, it will take some attention to eating more real food.  Vegetables, Fruits, Meat, Grains, & Dairy.  Packages, boxes and bags contain processed food with additives, not real food.

Did you know the life insurance companies (the experts on predicting life span) predict for the first time in known history that today's young generation will live a shorter life span than their parents.  That doesn't bother me.  Living as an older person with the debilitating, life limiting and painful chronic diseases of heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer would REALLY bother me.

 Want to learn more, click HERE for Winning With Smiles.com

Scott Thompson, DDS

Pediatric Dentistry

Meadow Vista, California

Photo credit: wikipedia commons

Sugar, It's More Than Cavities

Sugar
It’s more than Cavities

Good research is finally clarifying what has been known a long time.  For lack of full understanding of the metabolic processes, this has been a hard subject to broach and expect anybody to make a serious change in their life.  After all, we all love our sweets!

In the 1970’s books like “Sugar Blues” told us that sugar was the culprit in our dietary errors, not fat.  Though excess fat in the diet is likely not healthy, it is not nearly the culprit that sugar is.  After all, Eskimo and Northern American Indians lived on fat a large portion of the year.  Yet, they did not suffer heart disease or diabetes.  After the introduction of refined carbohydrate to their diet by Europeans, things began to change.  Eskimos and Native Americans now have the highest diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dental caries, and obesity rates in the world.  Dietary fat is not the issue.  It is refined carbohydrate; sugar.

I enjoyed a recent discussion between 3 pediatricians who specialize in metabolic disease and research.  They discussed how sugar is truly addictive, just like illicit drugs.  Is it any wonder it is so hard for us to reduce sugar in our diet?  Is it any wonder food processors have added sugar to nearly all our packaged and processed foods to improve our appreciation of their flavor.  Catsup is nearly 40% sugar!  Just read the labels, sugar is everywhere.

Approximately 50% of the sugar we eat is Fructose.  No system in the body uses Fructose.  It is up to the liver to detoxify the Fructose in our body and change it into something useful.  At 50 grams Fructose per day the liver begins to fail.  Yes, fail.  The average American who ate 15 grams of Fructose in the 1960’s is now eating 100 grams of Fructose daily.  And yes, livers are failing.  There are numerous cases of teenagers with total liver failure and needing liver transplants.

It is time to look at what we are eating.  Read labels.  Vitamin Water (What a misnomer!) is the lowest calorie beverage you can buy in the store today; only 50 calories per 8 oz.  That translates, in grams, to a full 20 oz bottle (small in today’s standards) having 33 grams of sugar.  That is more than the average American ate in an entire day in the 1960’s.

Keep your eyes on the health literature; this is a growing hot topic as degenerative disease claims more of our friends at younger ages.  Keep your eyes on the labels of packaged foods and be surprised!  Consider doing more “cooking” of real food from the vegetable, dairy and meat perimeter walls in your supermarket.  Real food.  Fresh food.

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