Your snoring might be more than an annoyance to your significant other. It may also be a symptom of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). OSA occurs when your throat muscles relax and block your airway while sleeping. This increases the air pressure in your throat, which causes the tissues to vibrate loudly, creating the snoring sound. OSA also has the potential to be dangerous if left untreated. Usually, people use an uncomfortable and cumbersome CPAP machine to treat it. Thankfully, there is an alternative to treat your sleep apnea—a custom-made oral appliance that doesn’t rely on machinery to help you sleep peacefully again. (more…)
How To Keep Your Child’s Smile Healthy
Even though your child’s teeth are going to fall out eventually, the health of your child’s teeth can have ramifications that affect the quality of their adult smile. It is absolutely vital for the future health of your child’s smile to be as persistent with the maintenance of their baby teeth as you are with your adult teeth. Thankfully, there are some easy steps that you can take to keep your child’s smile healthy. (more…)
Tips to Keep Teeth Clean Between Checkups and Cleanings
Checkups and cleanings are extremely important for maintaining your smile’s health. Your dentist is equipped to remove tartar buildup that your toothbrush and floss just can’t handle. Although you can’t keep your mouth healthy on your own, there are still things you can do in between dentist appointments to keep your teeth clean between checkups and cleanings and prevent your next appointment from escalating into a cavity filling or even a root canal. Here are some helpful tips to keep teeth clean between checkups and cleanings. (more…)
Why Tooth Extraction Might Be a Good Idea
For many people, wisdom tooth extraction is more than a good idea—it’s a necessity to stop the impacted molars from damaging the rest of their smiles. Sometimes, though, extracting a tooth that isn’t impacted is also a good idea, such as if the tooth is damaged or extremely infected, or if it’s lost support due to severe gum disease. In any case, tooth extraction is only a good idea when there’s no other restorative option to save it, or to save your healthy teeth and oral tissues from suffering collateral damage. (more…)
Make Your Tooth New Again with a Dental Crown
Your teeth can’t repair themselves when they’re damaged. But today’s dental crowns can make teeth like new again, protecting them so they can continue to perform their duties. In many cases, crowns are crafted to closely mimic your healthy, natural teeth, serving the dual purposes of restoring and cosmetically improving your smile at the same time. If you’ve lost a tooth, a crown might also serve as an excellent, highly lifelike replacement for it when supported by a dental crown. (more…)
3 Questions About Bonding & Contouring
It isn’t enough just to make your smile prettier; successful cosmetic dentistry also means protecting your natural teeth and gums to ensure your beautiful smile lasts for life. With tooth bonding and contouring, you can enjoy the best of both worlds—a significantly improved smile and the preservation of your healthy, natural smile’s tooth structure. Bonding and contouring are minimally invasive cosmetic touchups that can have dramatic effects on your smile’s appearance. They can also be part of a larger smile makeover plan to help you avoid more extensive treatments. (more…)
When Should Children Start Getting Checkups and Cleanings?
As a parent, you do all you can to give your children the tools they’ll need be healthy, happy adults. One of the first things we teach them is how to brush and floss their teeth every day, and it seems like every day, there’s a battle about what they expose their teeth to. Yet you might not instinctively know when your children should start attending checkups and cleanings, which are vital to maintaining a beautiful and healthy smile for the rest of their lives. We advise bringing children in for their visit to the dentist after the first tooth appears. (more…)
Do I Qualify for Dental Implants?
Dental implants are the most advanced form of tooth replacement, and are the only option for reestablishing the roots that supported your lost teeth. With implants, you can not only enjoy sturdier, more comfortable replacement teeth, but also benefit from a stronger, healthier jawbone in the long run. However, before you can receive them, you have to qualify for dental implants, mainly by having a strong enough jawbone and healthy enough gums to support them. (more…)
3 Common Questions About Root Canal Treatment
If you’ve never had root canal treatment (RCT), or if it’s been awhile since you have, then it’s natural to have questions about the procedure before signing up for it. For some people, the prospect of root canal treatment is a scary one, thanks to rumors that have plagued the procedure for decades. The good news is that most of those rumors are unfounded, are were formed by people who had exceptionally bad experiences in the past. The truth is that root canal treatment is often the path to relieving your severe toothache and saving your smile in cases of extreme internal tooth infection. (more…)
A Good Look at Porcelain Veneers
In the realm of cosmetic smile improvement, porcelain veneers are somewhat of a superstar. Teeth whitening may be more common, but veneers are becoming more popular due to their ability to correct a multitude of issues at once. Today, we take a good look at porcelain veneers and why they’re often the go-to option for patients who want a dramatic smile makeover but want to preserve as much of their natural tooth structure as possible. (more…)