Good oral and dental hygiene can help prevent the following:

• bad breath
• tooth decay
• gum disease
• and can help you keep your teeth as you get older.

Establishing & creating good oral hygiene and dietary habits has shown to be essential to achieving & maintaining, your oral health.

Oral health can affect both your physical & emotional well-being as it can impact the following

• Appearance
• Interpersonal relations
• Diet
• Nutrition
• Speech

In addition, a disease of the mouth can affect the rest of the body and is a contributing factor to a number of secondary conditions.

Yes, you can easily improve your dental hygiene at home. The following points below will help you practice good oral hygiene, if you have any further questions give our team at West Beach Dental a call:

1. Brush twice a day for at least two minutes.
2. Floss daily to remove plaque from places your toothbrush can’t reach.
3. Eat a healthy diet to provide the nutrients necessary (vitamins A and C, in particular) to prevent gum disease.
4. Avoid cigarettes and smokeless tobacco, which are known to contribute to gum disease and oral cancer.
5. Visit the dentist regularly for cleanings and exams. This is one of the most effective ways to detect the early signs of gum disease.

If you don’t take care of your teeth and gums, your poor oral hygiene can actually lead to other health problems, which can including:

Oral and facial pain

This pain may be largely due to infection of the gums that support the teeth and can lead to tooth loss. Gingivitis, an early stage of gum disease, is extremely common among individuals.

Problems with the heart and other major organs

Mouth infections can affect major organs. For example, the heart and heart valves can become inflamed by bacterial endocarditis, a condition that affects people with heart disease or anyone with damaged heart tissue.

Digestion problems

Digestion begins with physical and chemical processes in the mouth, and problems here can lead to intestinal failure, irritable bowel syndrome and other digestive disorders.

The grooves or fissure in your teeth can be so fine that the bristles of your toothbrush cannot reach the bottom of them.

The bottom of these grooves can accumulate small particles of food, this food then feeds the bacteria that live at the bottom of the grooves and cause cavities.

Fissure seals fill and seal the groove in our teeth so that food and bacteria cannot reach the bottom anymore.

Fissure seals protect your teeth from dental decay.

In the long term, fissure seals will protect you from needing fillings, and the cost of those fillings.

By avoiding dental fillings the survival of your tooth is much greater than a tooth that has had previous cavities.

Composite fillings use strong, durable resin to fill cavities and repair cracks or fractures in teeth.

Unlike amalgam (silver) fillings, composite fillings offer a tighter fit than these older dental filling materials and are aesthetically pleasing because they are the color of your natural teeth.

Much like dental bonding, this really comes down to a few factors:

• the size of the cavity
• your oral hygiene & maintenance
• diet
• regular dental appointments
• flossing

If you follow all of the above then you will extend your life but the average is around 10 years

There is not really a limit to how many fillings can be done at 1 time.

The biggest limit to how many cavities a patient can get done in one sitting depends on a variety of factors such as:

• How long can you be at the dentist’s?
• Do you have any time constraints?
• Can you hold your mouth open for an extended period of time?
• It also depends on how much anesthetic our dentists can administer safely.

But whether you need one filling, three fillings, or ten, our dental team can assist you.