Diamons

Patient Education

Photography by Dr. Padval

Vending Machines: Cavity Dispensers

Vending machines put out all kinds of stuff. But vending machines at work or school can dispense cavities right along with the candy and soda pop that we love so much in afternoon pick-me-ups. So-called soft drinks don't do teeth any favors. Not even diet soda. That's because sugar isn't the real culprit. It's carbonic acid—the stuff that gives soft drinks their fizzy bubbles can be deadly to tooth enamel. A sugary uncarbonated drink like Kool-Aid is actually easier on teeth than, say, Diet [...]

By |2017-07-11T00:00:33-07:00July 11, 2017|Patient Education|

What You and Your Mouth Need to Know About Cancer

Early Detection Remains Key Just as in any good crime show, the sooner the heroes discover the problem and get to work solving it, the better the outcome. Looking inside your mouth provides us a unique opportunity to detect other potential health problems, particularly the signs of oral cancer. Did you know that you get what amounts to a mini-cancer screening with every routine dental examination? And we continue to evaluate new screening products as they appear on the market. For most of our [...]

By |2017-06-27T00:00:33-07:00June 27, 2017|Patient Education|

Dental Choices Are Up to You!

Dental care has progressed to where we can now offer you a veritable smorgasbord of choices, a buffet of beautiful smiles. New materials and techniques allow us to treat your teeth more conservatively than ever, and decades of research have gone into developing materials—ceramics, polymer compounds, resin compounds and more—to repair worn, damaged or missing teeth. Unlike your father's dentist, we now have several effective ways to treat a toothache. The same is true of cosmetic issues like whitening and straightening and health problems [...]

By |2017-06-20T00:00:07-07:00June 20, 2017|Patient Education|

Dental Phobia

Not in my mouth you don't! The bad thing about dental phobia is that it prevents people from seeking the care they need—when they need it. The good thing about it is that, today, we can treat fear as successfully as we treat tooth decay or crooked teeth. Over six million people experience some degree of anxiety when they visit the dentist. Two million dental patients are just plain scared, so scared that they suffer shaking, confusion, heart palpitations and changes in speech and [...]

By |2017-06-06T00:00:42-07:00June 6, 2017|Patient Education|

Bad Oral Habits Explained

Tooth-related habits, too, can be conscious (brushing and flossing) or unconscious—chewing on pencils, for example. Dental habits become bad when teeth are expected to do things they're not cut out for—opening bottles, chewing off the little plastic tags on new clothing, trimming nails, and so on. And bad dental habits can be downright dangerous. To name a few: Swiss Army Mouth Mistaking your teeth for a sort of all-purpose bottle-cap-removal-unit-plus-toolbox is a great way of developing unnecessary chips, fractures, and dislocations. If this is [...]

By |2017-05-23T00:00:31-07:00May 23, 2017|Patient Education|

The Rubber Dental Dam

Throughout your treatment at our office, we want to keep you comfortable and safe while providing the best possible care. During many of our procedures we use a rubber dam (aka dental dam) to help. The rubber dam is a thin sheet that allows us to isolate the teeth we're treating. By stretching the rubber shield over a U-shaped framework, only the teeth being treated are exposed to the water spray and filling materials (such as silver amalgam bits or resin particles). The rest [...]

By |2017-05-02T00:00:24-07:00May 2, 2017|Patient Education|

Tongue-Thrusting

Train that Tongue Without therapy, the wrong oral habits, sooner or later, will cause tooth movement, breathing and speech problems You'd think swallowing is easy as falling off a log. But some of us need help retraining muscles that we've been using wrong all along. A "bad" swallow is just the luck of the draw, usually caused by unbalanced facial muscles or enlarged tonsils. When you swallow normally (and we do it about 2,000 times a day), the tip of the tongue is against [...]

By |2017-04-11T00:00:14-07:00April 11, 2017|Patient Education|

Alcohol and Your Health…

Just the Facts There's so much conflicting information regarding drinking alcohol blasting at us these days. A glass of red wine is good? Is even drinking at all a good idea? It's a matter of proportion. The facts are these. First, alcohol affects women more than men. Because men tend to be heavier in muscle mass, their bodies can process slightly more alcohol with fewer negative consequences than women's. But there's something else: the amount of an enzyme known as gastric alcohol dehydrogenase that's [...]

By |2017-03-14T00:00:35-07:00March 14, 2017|Patient Education|

These are Times that Stress Kids’ Mouths

What does a student facing exam pressure have in common with a World War I soldier—or an 18th-Century British sailor? More than you might think. Kids surviving on junk food and stress are at risk of two retro tooth-and-gum woes: trench mouth and scurvy. Trench Mouth (named for the soldiers) is better known today as ANUG, or Acute Necrotizing Ulcerative Gingivitis. While it's similar to periodontal disease, what sets ANUG apart is its immediate onset. Suddenly the mouth is sore, gums bleed easily, and…bad [...]

By |2017-02-21T00:00:06-08:00February 21, 2017|Patient Education|

Diabetes

The first clue to diabetes may be in your mouth! In many cases it's the dentist–and not the physician–who has the first opportunity in the early detection of diabetes, because diabetics are especially prone to dental problems. Swollen, tender, bleeding and receding gums, loose teeth, and a sore tongue may not just be signs of poor dental health. They may be danger signals for diabetes, too. If you have any of these symptoms, you may be one of the millions of Americans who has diabetes. [...]

By |2017-02-14T00:00:46-08:00February 14, 2017|Patient Education|