Dental Hygiene

Dental Hygiene

Maintaining a happy, healthy mouth

Healthy gums are fundamental to all of the procedures we provide. It forms a solid foundation onto which we can build healthy, happy, long lasting smiles.

Prevention is better than cure and we recommend that all our adult patients attend the hygienist regularly to have the health of their gums checked and any remedial treatment carried out – scale and polish.

The frequency of these appointments will be advised by your dentist but it is usually every 3 or 6 months.

Introducing Your Dental Therapist, Carla at The Tooth Doctor

What Happens when you see your hygienist? 

First of all we would take a plaque and bleeding score which measures how much plaque and bleeding you have in your mouth.  From this we can then tell where there are areas that need to be improved on.

After this, we would use a pocket chart to measure any more gum disease (if applicable). We then take future pocket charts to each appointment which would hopefully ensure that the gum disease is stabilising.

Following this we then remove all the hard and soft plaque from your teeth.  The hardened up plaque is called calculous and is impossible for you to remove at home, so we would remove this with our hand scalers and ultra-sonic scalers. 

By removing this any inflammation that you may have in your gums would hopefully settle down and the gum disease would stabilise. 

After this we would polish with this an air polisher.  It’s really good because it gets right in between the teeth unlike a normal polish.

After this we would go over some oral hygiene information.  This might just be tooth brushing, electric tooth brushing which we can do in the practice, floss, inter dental brushes, this is all tailored to your individual needs.

Our aim is to get your gums looking healthy and get you feeling better about yourself.

Results We Get With Air Flow Polishing

We often do air flow as part of our extensive hygiene programme. Air flow is a mix of air, water & powder.

The benefit of air flow is it gets in every nook and cranny, and removes surface stains like tea, coffee and red wine. 

With amazing results like this why not book yourself in for a hygiene visit to give your teeth a sparkle.

“Yes, My Air Polishing Treatment Was Pain Free”

The Easiest Way To Use Dental Floss With Janice

A lot of patients find it really hard to dental floss, and they feel they’re not doing it properly. Dental flossing is really important. Brushing our teeth removes a lot of the plaque, but cleaning in between our teeth once a day, it doesn’t matter when you do it, breakfast, noon or night-time, cleans a lot of bacteria from in between our teeth, reduces cavities by 40%, and reduces the risk of gum disease.

Some patients find it difficult to use dental floss, so a lot of patients use floss picks, which are really good. These are really easy to use. One of these does your full mouth, so you don’t need to fiddle about with the floss. These are really good for getting to the back of the mouth without having to get your fingers in. 

It doesn’t matter when you use it, just once a day using dental floss every day will really, really help your dental health.