4 Critical Ways to Minimise Your Dental Care
- You must spend more time cleaning your teeth and mouth compared to cleaning your butt.
- ZERO BIOLOGICAL COST – the ideal of good dental care
- Find a HAPPY DENTAL HOME!
- Believe: Dental Stability IS REAL AND ACHIEVABLE.
Here are the 4 key factors that Belle Dental believes WILL simplify your dental care needs, reduce the cost of your dental care AND give you a beautiful smile!
1. You must spend more time cleaning your teeth and mouth compared to cleaning your butt.
Stay with me on this one…
Yeah – I know it’s OBVIOUS – but people who achieve dental stability and have a beautiful smile all floss their teeth… properly.
If your gums bleed when you brush…
If your gums bleed when you floss…
If you have extreme sensitivity – especially to cold…
YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH YOUR HOME CARE!
Solution: 4 steps to saving money and time at the dentist
- Find a dentist you like. Yeah – I know we are a weird mob… shop around… get the feel of the practice – does it feel stressed / relaxed. If it feels relaxed… maybe the dentist knows what he/she is doing! Sense of humour is also important! Initially you will spend a bit more time with your dentist getting things in order – so it pays to find the right one.
- Get a thorough clean done! – You can’t get long lasting dental stability if you have scale (tartar) caked all over you teeth. Scale makes it impossible to floss properly, scale harbours bacteria that release all sorts of nasty chemicals that make your gums inflamed (bleeding) and these same chemicals are the ones that cause tooth sensitivity. These chemicals are released around your teeth and not only affect your gums (bleeding) but also affect your teeth (SENSITIVITY!). ALL of my patients that floss and have good home care routines have regular professional cleans with ULTRASONIC scaler (you know… that thingy that sprays water and shakes the scale off your teeth!) – WITHOUT SENSITIVITY or only occasional mild sensitivity in places.
- Commence a once a day, thorough home care routine. How long have you been neglecting your home care? Probably years. Bleeding gums is your indicator of health. If you want healthy teeth and gums you need to start the Belle Dental once a day home care routine and stick with it for 30 days. YES… 30 days. At the end of 30 days, bleeding from gums AND SENSITIVITY will be eliminated or restricted to spots where you have other problems that need to be addressed.
- Get your BASIC dental care done. NO… not crowns, veneers and implants (most dentists want to sell big ticket items before you’re ready for them!). Get your fundamentals in order – THINK SIMPLE. You will be amazed at what results we can achieve simply with some sound, tooth coloured fillings. They will be flossable, prevent food catching between your teeth and … gasp!… look like teeth. Yes… our fillings look like teeth.
2. ZERO BIOLOGICAL COST – the ideal of good dental care
What the hell? zero biological cost? you must be having me on!!!?
There are three costs associated with dental care: emotional cost, economic cost and Biological cost. There will always be an economic cost but there can be a huge variation in the biologic cost. The objective is to minimise BOTH – but especially, BIOLOGICAL cost. You will not grow more tooth, replacement of teeth is far more expensive than conserving existing tooth and bona fide replacements for teeth (and I’m not talking removable dentures!) are inferior to what God gave you!
Zero biological cost simply means – treatments that conserve teeth – conservative dentistry. At Belle Dental, we will not remove a speck more tooth than we have to… and our ideal is to remove NO tooth at all. Obviously, if there is decay – it’s gotta go!
Essentially, it is about cleaning your tooth – free of decay – ONCE. Bonding materials with a high bond strength, good colour and good contour ONCE. And then caring for and riding out the result for as long as possible – with the sound knowledge, that future adhesive techniques will allow for simplified, more tooth conserving solutions.
EXAMPLE 1: …you need a crown.
You present to your dentist Newcastle with a large filling that has broken. Your dentist says…’you need a crown’
What does that mean?
It means he/she wants to cut your tooth down to fit a ceramic crown on the top part of your tooth. An important consideration is… will the filling that has broken be replaced before the tooth is prepared for a crown? After all, the filling must have broken for a reason – maybe it was old, maybe it has some decay under it, maybe it was inadequate in some other way?
At Belle Dental, we ALWAYS replace fillings before placing a crown… BUT… if the filling was to be done properly, with modern dental adhesives, tooth coloured restorative materials and just a hint of panache… you could have one of Belle Dental’s CRC fillings – saving a significant amount of tooth (you only get one set of teeth remember) and at about HALF the cost of a crown!
Why weren’t you offered this? If you look at the photos in the link above… you can tell that this takes REAL skill. Yes, it does take real skill… but if the filling is to be redone properly before a crown is placed, it only really takes a bit more skill over and above a basic filling. Some dentists are motivated by the fees associated with crowns… some dentists just don’t have the skills to place these kinds of restorations. Either way, you pay the price… not in dollars… in tooth. This is the principle behind zero biological cost.
EXAMPLE 2: I’d like a smile makeover… but
You present to your Newcastle dentist – you want to improve the appearance of your smile. Why wouldn’t you? After all, 75% of all verbal communication happens in the triangle between your two eyes and your mouth – so the appearance of your teeth is important for the acceptance of your communication!
‘You need veneers…’ is the response from your dentist. ‘we just cut a bit off the front of your front teeth…’
HANG ON!
‘…bit off the front of your teeth…’ – how much is a bit? is it 10% of your front teeth? is it 25% of your front teeth? Is it ‘just’ the critical enamel layer of the front of your teeth that provides rigidity, resilience, strength and beauty to your teeth?
How long will it last? Most cosmetic therapies fail (at least cosmetically) by the 12th year after placement… then what? If you’re still motivated… you get the veneers cut off your teeth (with a slight further loss in tooth structure…)
At Belle Dental, we have a plan. Not for what we are doing now. Not for what we will do in 10 or 12 years’ time. We have a plan for the lifetime of your teeth.
All the veneer cases in our smile makeover gallery are done directly in the mouth usually with ZERO loss of tooth structure (sometimes correcting tooth position requires some reduction – however we will discuss this with you before the appointment – AND this loss of tooth can often be overcome with some preliminary orthodontics).
What does this mean to you? in 12 years… when the veneers fail cosmetically, we can either resurface them in similar resin materials we used in the first place OR, we can cut into the resin – NOT TOUCHING the underlying tooth – and resurface the veneers in ceramic. Either way… the biological cost is ZERO.
Our IDEAL is ZERO biological cost. It is not always achievable – however – a low biological cost procedure will always provide better value in the long term when consideration is given to both economic AND biological factors.
3. Find a HAPPY DENTAL HOME!
Too many cooks spoil the broth! Find someone you know and trust, someone who has a plan and is in dentistry for the long term. Get regular dental care – you should be able to ring your dentist, recognise their voice on the phone and get advice over the phone. SIMPLE.
4. Believe: Dental Stability IS REAL AND ACHIEVABLE
You need a simple plan (preferably devoid of complex and expensive treatment strategies), you need to execute the plan and have, as a critical part of the plan, a strategy for maintaining your investment.
The simpler your treatment (lowest biological cost) -> the more stability you can achieve.
The more stability you can achieve -> the lower the economic cost of your dental care.
