Here’s Why General Dentistry Matters
General dentistry, it’s important because number one, it’s important to maintain oral hygiene. I mean, we see patients so often that don’t have all of their teeth or don’t have any of their original teeth, and until you don’t have that, you really don’t know what a burden that becomes. So we want you to be able to keep everything that you’ve got, okay? So regular maintenance on that is super important. But beyond that, I mean, there are so many medical problems that to show up in the mouth that people don’t realize. Whether it be periodontal problems, we’ve got gum bleeding and that sort of thing; sometimes that can be linked to heart disease. Or you may see a patient who’s very slow to heal or something and link that to diabetes, and there are just so many different things that are linked to that.
But so what we’re able to do a lot of times through normal routine exams is we’re able to catch things really before they become a big problem. So we want to see people on a routine basis because things don’t have the opportunity to go from bad to worse. We’re able to catch that in the meantime. So if somebody comes in and has an issue, we’re able to correct that relatively quickly to where it doesn’t become something larger. Or if they come in for the first time and they have some issues with their gums, perhaps they have the beginnings of gum disease, we’re able to go in and remove that, treat that, and get rid of it basically, see that patient on a regular basis to make sure that doesn’t come back. Therefore, things that would have started potentially in the mouth and lead to more systemic problems in the body don’t happen because we were able to see them and kind of hit that off before it becomes a problem.