Report on Gum Disease

Congratulations on taking the first and most important step to total dental health---educating yourself!

This report is designed to inform and educate you about the basic causes of most people’s dental health problems. The report is divided into three sections; the first will explain the disease that is at the root of the problem. The second section will cover common myths about dental health and give you the facts to combat them. The final section will explain what your dentist can do for you to help keep this disease at bay and put you on the road to complete dental health.

If you have any questions after reading this report please feel free to call my office with them. The purpose of this report and my goal in dentistry is to help you become healthy!

Explaining Dental Disease

If given a choice most people would say that they would rather be healthy than not, unfortunately, unlike general health, most people can’t tell if they are dentally healthy or not. This is because dental health rarely hurts. If you have the flu, you know that there is something wrong and you take the proper steps to treat yourself. This is not the case when it comes to your oral health. More than 80% of the entire population is living with a chronic oral infection, and most have absolutely no idea what is going on in their mouths right now. It’s not that they’ve never been to the dentist or that they don’t brush their teeth. So what’s going on here?

The cause of all these dental problems is well known and well understood! It’s just rarely well communicated to you, the patient. The cause is quite simply, an infection. A chronic, low grade, painless oral infection that over time destroys everything it comes into contact with—teeth, gums, and jawbone!

We’re well aware of the fact that we can have many serious health problems going on in our bodies at any given time. Generally people are unaware of these problems because they outwardly appear to be just fine. People rarely notice such things as; high blood pressure, clogged arteries, glaucoma, or the early stages of diseases like diabetes or cancer. The same thing is true of dental diseases, except that people are no where near as well informed about dental health as they are about medical health. While the vast majority of us suffer from this chronic dental information to one degree or another, but the most of us are completely unaware of it! Fortunately, unlike many painless diseases, it’s easy to diagnose and responds well to treatment in nearly all cases.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the damage caused by this infectious disease; cavities and tooth decay, abscesses and toothaches, tender inflamed bleeding gums, gum pockets, gingivitis, loose or shifting teeth, periodontal disease, sensitive teeth, bad breath, and tartar buildup just too mention a few!

Oral infection is simply too many germs in all the wrong places—the pits, fissures, grooves, and the cracks and crevices of teeth; or underneath leaky unsealed fillings as well as in the cavities and gum pockets (gums form a turtleneck collar around each tooth, the space between the gum and tooth-where all the germs and popcorn kernels hide!-is called a “pocket”) and even inside our gums and bone. The germs start on the surfaces of our teeth and in our gum pocket spaces, and then (this is the part most people don’t realize) the germs infiltrate into the lining of our gum tissue itself! Unless the germs and the diseased layer of gum tissue they live in are removed, they will slowly wreak havoc in our mouths.

Dental disease is similar to what our bodies would be like without bathing. If we were to stop bathing, over time our skin would become more and more dirty, smelly, inflamed, rashy, raw, and even ulcerated and infected as the germs continued multiply and entrench themselves. The same thing happens in our mouths, only worse because there are so many more nooks, crannies, and recesses for the germs to hide in our mouths compared to our relatively smooth bodies. Thankfully, just as skin is easy to restore to health with proper hygiene, so are our mouths!

In medicine, we strive for prevention, but we know far less about preventing medical diseases then we know about preventing dental diseases. In dentistry, we know an infection is the cause of the problems, and we have proven ways to control the infection. As a result we’re quite successful in preventing the damage to out teeth, gums, and bone that the infection causes.

About the word prevention; it’s probably the most misunderstood and misused word in dentistry. Many patients come to me with a full blown infection silently destroying their mouths, thinking everything is fine, and mainly interested in “prevention”. Think about that for a minute! Isn’t it a little late for “prevention” if you already have something? The problem is, they’re unaware they have something because nothing hurts and nothing’s broken. The patient wants to prevent needing filling, root canals, etc. Getting rid of the infection would indeed prevent these things but they first need to realize that an infection causes these problems, that they have this infection, that they need treatment to get rid of the infection, and that they need to prevent the infection from coming back. I help with all this.

If you would like to ensure that you are in good dental health and free from infection, please call us at (732) 530-5111 to schedule an appointment for a complete exam. The sooner you call us, the sooner you can achieve the healthy mouth you’re looking for! Call today!

Denise DiBona, DDS, LLC
General Dentistry	732-530-5111