Periodontal Maintenance vs Regular Cleaning
Which is it, teeth and gums, or gums and teeth? You cannot have one without the other. It is a terrifically delicate system working together to help you with your daily nutrition requirements, but also giving you the ability to speak and to enjoy the ability to smile naturally. Regular and consistent cleaning is crucial to keep your teeth clean and healthy. Adding periodontal maintenance, which now focuses on the soft tissues of the gums, helps keep the entire system healthy. There is a cause-and-effect relationship between the two. One could argue that if your teeth are properly maintained, you might never need periodontal maintenance. Let us break the two procedures down to see the difference.
Regular Teeth Cleaning, or Prophylaxis
The health and dental industries advise us to brush our teeth twice a day and floss once a day. This is because everyone has millions of bacteria in their mouths every day. If allowed to collect on your teeth, that bacteria will turn into a sticky substance called plaque. The plaque contains an acid that immediately attacks the enamel of the tooth, creating a cavity. When you brush, you remove the daily plaque. The cycle begins again as soon as you put the brush down.
Regular teeth cleaning is a perfect example of performing prevention. You should schedule regular dental examinations every six months. X-Rays capture and create a history of the condition and health of your teeth below the gumline. After a thorough exam investigating any defects, you next get to enjoy professional teeth cleaning. With the use of a scaler tool or an ultrasonic device, your dental team removes all the mature, damaging plaque you may have missed or that has hardened to the point where you can't clean it on your own. Now comes the cause-and-effect scenario.
The Periodontal Maintenance Procedure
If you were to successfully keep your teeth plaque-free, you could never need periodontal maintenance. This procedure is necessary due to the plaque building up, cascading down the teeth, and then encountering soft tissue of the gums. This results in an immediate gum infection, with your gum tissue swelling, becoming red, bleeding easily, and starting to sag away from your now dirty tooth roots, creating unhealthy gaps between your teeth which your gums will never again fill. These gaps tend to harbor food and bacteria instead gums and become even more of a challenge to keep clean. Once this has occurred, the process of teeth cleaning needs to progress down the teeth and to the roots. You may need a local anesthetic or even a sedative, depending on the amount of accumulated plaque and how deep it has become. These bacteria can burrow over an inch below the gum surface, as you could imagine, we can clean this far below but not without comfortable anesthesia. The process takes longer to get everything clean because we can not see and must work by feel instead.
As soon as the plaque, or the sole source of the disease, is removed, the soft tissue begins to heal. The inflammation will recede, the healthy color returns, and the sagging pockets around the teeth will shrink. If left unattended, the periodontal disease will easily result in loose teeth, bone loss, and even the loss of teeth. All of which can be easily prevented if attended to.
Regular periodontal maintenance may be necessary if you have had periodontal disease and are prone to it returning. After your dental team understands your at-home oral hygiene and your dietary habits, we can help work with you to advise how often it would be wise to consider scheduling periodontal maintenance. For most people this is more than twice a year at first, and they can graduate to longer intervals after things have been proven stable. You may want to consider diet changes, limiting sugar intake or starchy foods. Combined with routine cleanings and this simple change is all most people need to keep their teeth healthy, gums healthy, and their smile healthy.
Related Article: What is Dental Prophylaxis?