For most of your dental health care, you’ve heard that the best thing you can do for your smile is to preserve your healthy, natural tooth structure as best you can. Therefore, if you’re told that one or more teeth need to be extracted, you might wonder if it’s really a good thing for your smile. The need for tooth extraction isn’t as common as it used to be before the advancement of modern dentistry. However, it can still arise under certain circumstances, and if it does, then seeking treatment as soon as possible could be essential to preserving the rest of your healthy smile. (more…)
The Best Times to Consider Dental Implants
No matter what type of oral health issue you face, there’s an optimal oral health treatment plan designed to maximize your ability to recover from it. When it comes to tooth loss, that treatment plan is often to replace the lost tooth or teeth with an appropriate number of dental implants. However, the specific ways in which your smile benefits from dental implants depends on the specific considerations surrounding your tooth loss. Today, we examine a few common reasons why people choose dental implants, and how the innovative restorations can benefit them given those conditions. (more…)
Ways Your Jawbone Can Grow Weaker Over Time
For many common oral health problems, the visible impacts they have on your smile are limited in their earliest stages. It’s the more severe phases of oral health concerns that can begin to have noticeable impacts on the appearance of your smile, facial structures, and more. Depending on the nature of your oral health concern, that may include the integrity and appearance of your jawbone structure, which serves as the foundation of your smile as much as the supportive base for many of your facial features. Sometimes, a chronic concern like extensive periodontal disease or the sustained loss of stimulation due to one or more missing teeth roots can have a significantly negative impact on this foundation. Today, we explore how by examining the ways in which periodontal disease and tooth loss can cause your jawbone to grow weaker over time. (more…)
A Few Things to Remember About Your Wisdom Teeth
If you never heard of wisdom teeth before, then you may be surprised to find yourself still growing teeth well into your adulthood. Fortunately, most people recognize what wisdom teeth are, and more importantly, they’ve heard (at least to some degree) about the problems wisdom teeth can often cause. Because of these problems, extracting wisdom teeth is often an important part of preserving your smile’s health and integrity. Today, we explore a few things you should remember about your wisdom teeth, and why extracting them is typically the best way to deal with them. (more…)
Concerned About Tooth Loss? Here’s What to Know
Tooth loss today isn’t what it used to be. More people than ever are able to prevent it, and those who experience it are able to rebuild their smiles with more lifelike results than ever before. However, the loss of a tooth is still a significant event in the course of your oral health care. Preventing it is always preferable, though it may take more care than you realize, and dealing with it (or failing to) can have farther reaching impacts than you might expect. (more…)
3 Things that Can Impact Your Jawbone
For your general dental health care, the focus is often mainly on your teeth and gum tissues. That’s because the most common chronic dental issues are tooth decay and gum disease, which develop in and progress through these tissues. However, some of the more complex concerns that could affect your oral health involve the size, shape, health, and integrity of other oral structures, such as your jawbone. As the foundation that supports your teeth and gum tissues, your jawbone is just as important to your oral health, and if necessary, we can perform corrective jaw surgery to improve it. (more…)
Are Dental Implants Really Better for Your Smile?
When it comes to your dental treatment, what’s best for your smile is the treatment option that offers the most lifelike and conservative option for restoring your good oral health. In the case of tooth loss, however, that can be trickier than addressing more common dental concerns. You have few options when it comes to replacing your lost teeth, based mainly on exactly how many teeth you’ve lost. However, one of those options almost always includes a prosthesis that’s supported on one or more dental implant posts. Today, we examine why dental implants are often better for your smile and oral health, and why you should consider them if you need to address tooth loss of any degree. (more…)
Will You Need Oral Surgery for That?
When you fail to keep up with general dental care, you can expose your oral health to common issues like a tooth decaying or your gums becoming diseased. Most common issues can also be addressed by your general dentist during your next checkup or other subsequent visit, even if it reaches a severe stage. However, there are many oral health concerns that can’t be corrected with general care, and in some cases, couldn’t have been prevented, either. Such conditions may require a customized oral surgery plan to correct. (more…)
Things that Get Worse After Tooth Loss
To some people, tooth loss seems like a cosmetic issue. The biggest impact it has on their lives might be their smile’s appearance, at least at first, which is why that’s often the biggest motivating reason to seek treatment to replace their lost teeth. However, tooth loss is a big deal for nearly every aspect of your oral health, not just your smile’s appearance, and if you hesitate to address it, you might experience a number of negative impacts. (more…)
Why You Don’t Need to Replace Extracted Wisdom Teeth
For most cases that involve the need for tooth loss, removing the tooth is required because no other solution will suffice. With the goal of fully restoring your smile, however, many tooth extraction procedures are followed as soon as possible by replacing the extracted tooth. Doing so helps you avoid the potential consequences of tooth loss and rebuild your bite’s ability to function properly. However, with impacted wisdom teeth, which are among the most common types of extracted teeth, there’s typically no need to replace the tooth after it’s been removed. (more…)
Dr. Rogers was published in CDA’s November Issue. Click above to see his article (pg.601).