Article by Brandon Delanya
A long time ago, you could visit your local dentist and get your teeth cleaned and your hair cut at the same time! Barbers used to double as dentists. Thankfully, modern dentistry has come a long ways since then.
Proper teeth cleaning is an important part of dental hygiene that should not be avoided. You should visit your dentist and get a thorough cleaning at least several times per year. Although this is not news to the majority of adults, you’ll find that most people postpone their dental appointments for as long as humanly possible. Their reasoning varies with each individual. For a few people, it’s about money; they don’t have dental insurance and they don’t have the extra spending cash to allocate for dental appointments. For others, it’s the association with pain and discomfort that goes along with visiting a dentist.
Whether it’s the feeling of discomfort or it’s your pocketbook that’s keeping you from visiting your local dentist for routine cleaning, it’s an unacceptable excuse. By taking care of your teeth, you’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of healthy teeth and gum. If you neglect your teeth, the long term costs and discomfort become expensive and can lead to tooth loss as well as gum complications.
The basic essentials for most people are in this order: food, water, shelter, and then miscellaneous items such as toiletries. Dental care is almost never on the top of a person’s list of priorities. This is particularly true during tough economic times. People will spend money on their essentials and neglect the long term care required for their teeth and gum. If money is your primary concern for taking proper care of your teeth, you shouldn’t let that prevent you from getting proper dental care. You should talk to your dentist and ask him if he will take payments or extend credit. You might be surprised to learn that most dentists will allow people to establish a payment plan for their dental care. After all, a dentist is a doctor, and their primary concern is with helping people.
For those people who postpone their dental visits as often as possible, they will eventually wake up with a severe tooth ache one day. Their tooth will be extremely sensitive to cold and hot temperatures (mostly with liquids). Those symptoms basically mean a person has either a cavity or a cracked tooth. If the person was prone to neglecting dental visits, he or she probably has a cavity. Cracked teeth are usually the result of chewing on something that is too hard for the enamel to handle (such as a small rock or piece of metal). When a person gets a cracked tooth, they usually know the instant it occurs.
Postponing dental visits can become a costly adventure. For me, I avoided regular dental checkups and teeth cleaning for close to ten years. When I finally visited the dentist, surprisingly I didn’t have any cavities, but I did have to pay for deep cleaning in all four quadrants of my mouth. Deep cleaning requires a local anesthetic because the dentist will be cleaning under your gum line (which would be very painful without the anesthetic). Deep cleaning for all four quadrants usually ranges anywhere from two thousand to four thousand dollars depending on your dentist.
Not only was deep cleaning quite expensive, but my mouth was very sore for a few days after each cleaning. Because the dentist will numb your mouth, they will usually not clean all four quadrants at once; you will be visiting the dentist at least two times before the process is completed. Your face, tongue, and possibly even your cheeks will be numb when you leave his office. You won’t be able to speak properly, and you’ll probably have a hard time chewing. Lack of proper speech and the potential for biting your tongue are the reasons why the dentist will not deep clean your entire mouth during the same appointment.
Routine dental checkups are very inexpensive compared to deep cleaning. Try to make your routine dental cleaning appointments. Believe me, in the long run, the routine cleaning pays off!