THERE are many misperceptions about the mouth. Here are the top three misthinks that people have about their teeth and gums.
In third place: Patients avoid brushing over their gums in case they bleed, believing that this is causing damage, but this actually makes the situation worse. The bleeding is a sign of gum disease and the best way of tackling it is head-on.
Get right in there with the toothbrush and scrub the gums where they meet the tooth, and not just the tooth itself. By doing this you give the gums a mini massage and sweep away all the soft white plaque that contains the gum eating bacteria.
In fact, brush three times as much to stop bleeding gums and get in between the teeth with tiny brushes or wood sticks if you really want to go to town and regain health.
When the gums are super clean the bleeding will stop and gum disease calms down. Avoiding cleaning the gums speeds up the disease process and races towards a car crash situation where the bone starts dissolving around the teeth and eventually, they will drop out.
Next up: The belief that if all is comfortable then there are no problems. This one catches a lot of people out as unbeknownst to the owner of the teeth there can be massive holes silently enlarging beneath perfect looking enamel.
Left unattended to, the decay mushrooms until it contacts the nerve core which ends up with an episode of eye-watering pain and face swelling. Regular check-ups with your dentist can help nip problems in the bud.
And in pole position: The idea that dentists can see everything on X-rays and scans.
One of the trickiest things to diagnose is a cracked tooth. If a crack in a tooth is small, it's not visible on an X-ray or scan and the tooth can look perfect in the mouth but there's still pain.
Since there isn't a definite place in the brain linked to each tooth it can be impossible to tell which tooth is responsible for the pain and sometimes it's only with time that the pain locates on to the offending tooth so that we know which one to treat.
