The act of visiting your dentist every six months doesn’t have to be an occasion to dread. To stay ahead of painful oral conditions, it’s vital to get into the regular habit of going in for a dental checkup. While many people feel anxious or don’t understand the benefits of routine oral exams, refraining to schedule an appointment could cause disastrous effects to both your oral health and overall health in the long run. Keep reading to learn how to plan for your checkup, what to expect during your dental exam, and how to maintain oral health afterwards. 

Pre-Planning

Be sure to regularly floss and brush your teeth twice a day in the months and weeks prior to your dental exam. Upon scheduling your appointment, the receptionist will ask for your dental insurance and make sure their office is covered within your network. Make sure to plan your appointment on a day that makes sense in your schedule, we recommend an appointment after work so that you can go straight home after your cleaning. Finally, on the day of your appointment, we recommend you floss and brush your teeth so that your dentist isn’t met with food particles between your teeth. Be sure to arrive to the office at least 10-minutes early to fill out paperwork and have your driver’s license and dental insurance card ready.

What to Expect from Your Dental Exam

Once you’ve spoken with the receptionist and the hygienist has called you to the exam room, they’ll guide you to sit in a dental chair and lean you back. The hygienist will begin your dental checkup with a teeth cleaning that consists of:

• Take X-Rays of your mouth if necessary.
• Use various dental instruments to remove tartar and plague from around the surface of your teeth and gumline.
• Floss your teeth.
• Polish the surface of your teeth with a toothpaste and a toothbrush.
• Report any concerns or findings to your dentist.

Following your teeth cleaning, the hygienist will leave and your dentist will enter the room to finish the exam. Dentists typically review your X-rays, examine your gums and throat for any abnormalities, inspect your teeth for cavities, discuss your overall oral health with you, and then finally recommend any dental work you may need to maintain optimal dental health. After leaving your dentist appointment, it’s advised to not eat foods or drink liquids other than water for at least an hour.

Maintain Oral Health with GumChucks

When you eat, drink, or breathe, bacteria and other microorganisms enter your mouth. When these bacteria combine with your saliva, tartar begins to form between your teeth and along the gum line. When tartar isn’t regularly removed, it hardens into a yellow substance called plaque which can build up along your gum line.

Poor oral hygiene habits allow the acids produced by dental plaque to eat away at tooth enamel over time, which causes cavities. This slow buildup of sticky tartar eventually leads to gingivitis, resulting in red, swollen, and often bleeding gum tissue. If gingivitis is left untreated, the next step in this bacteria buildup is gum disease. Gum disease causes numerous serious health concerns like a receding gum line, bleeding gums, and even tooth loss. 

It’s been said that the mouth is a mirror of health and disease throughout the body, which means that poor oral health can negatively affect overall health. When your teeth reach a stage of intensive plaque build-up, they began to rot which results in bacteria entering into your bloodstream and traveling throughout the rest of your body, which can lead to serious health conditions such as:

• Heart disease
• Diabetes
• Osteoporosis
• Alzheimer’s Disease
• Pneumonia

To prevent these numerous painful health complications, it’s important to practice affective oral health habits beforehand. Flossing is the only way to remove this tartar from between your teeth and keep plaque out of hard-to-reach places. Fortunately, GumChuck’s unique design does this better than any other flosser on the market. GumChucks’ design ensures a flossing experience that’s faster, easier, and more effective than competing flossers or traditional floss. Our two handles with disposable floss allow you to comfortably reach all your teeth, even those in the back, while wrapping the floss around each tooth. This creates the vital “C-Shape” necessary to get below the gum line and effectively clean each tooth.