Gum Disease Treatment

Periodontal therapy, everyone's heard it. A lot of people don't understand what it is. Periodontics is basically the support structures of teeth, the gum and bone, as well as the teeth themselves. Periodontal disease, gingivitis, again another word that we've heard, it's basically, are you going to keep your teeth? Teeth have roots. Roots are in the bone. The bones of our mouth are one of the few areas where if you lose bone, it doesn't come back. If we break our arm, the doctor puts it in a cast, the bone regrows, it heals, you take the cast off, your arm is fine. If you have a situation in your mouth, where you've got periodontal disease to the extent that you are losing the bone around your teeth, even if we can reverse that situation, the bone will not come back. So, the more bone you have around the roots of your teeth, the stronger your teeth are. If your teeth are moving, wiggling around because they don't have a lot of support, then you have issues with chewing, and eventually you'll lose those teeth. Periodontal therapy includes just coming in regularly to get your teeth cleaned. We're removing plaque and the bacteria that is in plaque. And that keeps your gums and the bone of your mouth healthy. It starts with a good thorough cleaning. Sometimes there's tartar and mineral buildup below the gum line that would be uncomfortable to do as if you were doing a regular dental cleaning. So we simply put some anesthetic in there, so we're able to get to get in to reach to those areas to clean everything out. And that removes the bacteria, bacteria that are in there that produce acids that cause the irritation and cause the bone to dissolve. If a patient has a lot of tartar buildup on their teeth, the improvement is immediate, because they'll say, "Wow, I can feel my teeth." You get to a situation where we think that you would be better served going to a periodontist, then I partner with some great ones. They'll go to the periodontist, and then three months later they'll come to my office, where we're maintaining their periodontal condition but we're also at those appointments looking at the teeth, diagnosing, looking for decay, any areas of any type of disease process or issues with the teeth that we need to address.