Your dental check up – in twelve points
If you thought that a check up was just a quick look at the teeth, think again! Every time you visit us for a check up, we carefully consider twelve separate aspects of your health. We keep records of our findings on each visit, so that we can monitor your health and give you tips and advice about staying healthy. This means we are actively helping you to prevent future dental problems and so hopefully minimising future work and expense!
The twelve points are:
- Update your personal and medical history. This enables us to contact you and means that we can be sure that any of our treatment is not compromised by any condition you may have or medication you may be taking.
- Discuss any concerns you may have about your dental health since your last visit.
- Examine you jaw joint – is it working correctly? If not this can lead to headaches and migraines.
- Outside the mouth – we look for swollen glands and asymmetry which could signify the presence of infection or other disease.
- Inside the mouth – we look for lumps and bumps and ulcers. His completes our oral cancer check.
- Your teeth – we look for early signs of decay.
- Your fillings – if a filling starts to deteriorate it can be more economical and conservative to replace/repair immediately.
- Your gums – Gum disease is the most common human disease. It can cause the loss of a tooth in more cases than dental decay, particularly in older age groups. The progression of gum disease can be very gradual over long periods of time, causing pain initially. Thus, careful monitoring of the gum condition is very important in picking this disease up its earlier stages when treatment is more straightforward.
- Your x-rays – we review these and depending on our visible examination, any symptoms you may have and the duration of time since the last x-rays decide whether we need to take further views.
- We discuss our findings and offer advice about these and any other concerns you may have.
- We arrange for treatment to be carried out and discuss cost.
- Finally we discuss with you and arrange when we would like to carry out our next dental examination. The interval may vary between patients but it is usually between 3 months and 18 months.
