Home – Six Monthly Checkups
If there’s nothing wrong, sometimes you feel like you don’t need to see a dentist, right? Having a dentist poking about in your mouth isn’t that much fun right?
That’s kind of like saying that you can buy an Audi and never wash or service it.
Imagine your teeth are a new car. At 10 years old, your adult teeth are brand new. You take them for a test drive, they feel pretty good and as you grow, the best-case scenario is that they grow straight and strong, ready to manage everything you eat and drink.
As you consume your favourite food and drink, tiny particles get stuck on the teeth. A bit of tartar starts to form and even though you clean daily, it isn’t quite removed.
There’s a good chance that at some stage a tooth might not behave as well, either a wisdom tooth, one that didn’t grow straight or perhaps one that just keeps hanging in there while the adult tooth is growing through. Or that you may grind in your sleep. It’s very common.
Without a regular service, your car will eventually break down and at that point it usually costs more than you would like to get it back on the road.
Your teeth are no different and the costs are higher – you’re in pain at an inconvenient time and your teeth might even cost more than your car to repair.
As you grow up, your teeth move and change position. This happens more as a child while your jaw is changing shape and growing and as you lose baby teeth, but as an adult your teeth still move.
Wisdom teeth may come in, you brush a certain way and often there are small things that happen over time that need to be remedied before they become problems.
Even if you aren’t in pain, have no visible signs on the outside of the tooth, inside or along the gum, recession, tartar, gum disease and cracks can occur without you having any idea.
Poor gum health can cause you to lose even healthy teeth. Receding gum, loose teeth, gaps between teeth, bleeding, swollen or bad smelling gums due to gingivitis are some of the common results of not having regular dental maintenance.
For a while, your teeth will manage the extra stress. But as they weaken, you end up in pain and at that point, you’ve got a far costlier solution that you need done in a quick time frame.
*view Australian Dental Association recommendations.
The primary reason to have a checkup is to make sure that your teeth are maintained by deep cleaning, fluoridation, education and x-rays to confirm there are no underlying issues.
By following these basic steps with your local Melbourne dentist, most teeth and gum issues are caught very early, which allows you to reverse or fix the damage in a cheaper, less traumatic manner.
Regular x-rays allow the dentist to see inside the tooth and really make sure that there is nothing more serious that needs to be addressed.
If you’d like to know more about the process in detail, please go to our regular checkup explanation page.
Any surgical or invasive procedure carries risks.
Before proceeding, you should seek a second opinion from an appropriately qualified health practitioner.
We acknowledge that Chadstone Dental is on the Traditional Lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the East Kulin Nations and pay our respect to their Elders past, present and emerging. We honour and respect the cultural heritage, customs and beliefs of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded