Looking After Baby Teeth
Why early years oral care is so important.
We often discuss how you can take better care of your teeth as adults. For babies and very young children though, they can’t take care of their own teeth and the responsibility falls to their parents to do so. Oral health care for a baby is important but sometimes gets forgotten amongst the hundreds of other things there are to do.
For mums to be and those who are mums of young children already, our Synergy Clinic dentists offer some useful advice.
Young babies
It seems reasonable to think that as babies typically have no teeth you shouldn’t have to worry about them at this stage. Whilst you obviously can’t clean their teeth, you should still make sure that their gums are kept clean to prevent infections and discomfort. This can be done quite easily by using a damp clean cloth and gently wiping the gums.
Baby’s first dental visit
One parental dilemma is when you should take your baby to the dentist for the very first time. We generally recommend that this is done around the time of their first birthday. Although no dental treatment is likely at this stage, it is a good opportunity to chat about their oral health care and for any advice to be offered. It is also a good opportunity for the baby to start to get used to a dental environment. There is some evidence that suggests that early and regular exposure to a dental practice will help them to avoid unnecessary anxiety about visiting when they grow older.
Please try to make sure when you leave our Addlestone practice to book your next appointment so that you stay in the routine and don’t let their oral care slip.
The teeth whitening procedure has been steadily growing in popularity for a number of years, perhaps spurred on by TV shows such as Love Island. Whilst it was once more widely used by middle aged people whose teeth had started to discolour as they got older, it is increasingly popular with younger people who are looking to achieve a perfect smile like those on the TV.
One of the biggest advances in dental technology over the past twenty years or so has been the increasingly widespread use of dental implants to replace missing teeth. Whilst dentures do have some advantages, such as removing the need for a procedure in many cases, they also have a number of drawbacks for a lot of people who wear them.
Have you made any New Year’s resolutions? Is to stop smoking one of them? If so, you will be one of many thousands who attempt to do this each year. Some will succeed while others will fail to maintain it for very long and there are good reasons for this. Apart from the fact that it is often a social habit and one that is sometimes influenced by our peer group, cigarettes contain nicotine, a highly addictive substance that can lead to withdrawal symptoms when we deprive our bodies of it by not smoking.
This will be our last blog post before Xmas so we thought that we would use it to look forward to the year ahead, and especially for patients of the Synergy Clinic who may be considering some improvements to their smile in 2020.
Ask almost anyone to name the two most fundamental pieces of dental equipment necessary for healthy teeth and they will almost certainly say toothbrush and toothpaste.
There are now thought to be in excess of half a million vegans in the UK according to the Vegan Society. Add to that, a growing section of the population who are increasing the number of plant based meals they consume, and it would appear that this is a growing trend that may be here to stay.
It might be that you are revelling in the intricacies of the political world at the moment. It is probably more likely though that you are wishing that politicians would disappear from our TV screens, at least for a little while, to give us some breathing space.
In an ideal world, we would all have a full set of healthy, even and beautifully white teeth. In reality, this is very rare indeed without the intervention of cosmetic dentistry.
