The Importance of Regular Dental Checkups

The Importance of Regular Dental Checkups: A discussion on why regular dental checkups are essential to maintaining good oral health, and how they can prevent serious dental problems.

Even when traveling to other places, everyone should get regular checkups for their teeth. Some tourists even go about it and travel for the sake of dental checkups, like in the case of the dental tourism industry of Thailand.

After all, everyone who has teeth needs to do regular dental checkups to keep their teeth in tiptop shape. Also, Thailand—the “Land of Smiles”—offers advanced medical and dental services at great prices. The country is home to many dental hospitals, centers, schools, and clinics like the Thantakit Dental Center, which offers state-of-the-art dental technology and affordable checkups by highly educated and well-trained Thai dentists.

This article covers the reasons behind a routine dental checkup and why it’s so highly recommended among dentists in the first place.

What is the Purpose of a Routine Dental Checkup?

A routine dental checkup ensures you have no oral health issues involving your teeth, gums, jaws, the inside of your mouth, and so forth. This is why it’s important. It detects in advance any condition that could become worse the longer you neglect it.

You want to detect such issues as soon as possible because it’s the best method of dealing with oral health diseases—by preventing them or treating them in advance with early detection.

• How Often Should Dental Checkups Be? You should at least get your teeth checked out or cleaned every six months at the local dentist or even an affordable overseas one if you’re traveling to places like Thailand. Brush twice a day and get your teeth checked twice a year.
• Why is Early Detection of Oral Diseases Important? You can prevent a wide range of diseases by having a routine checkup with your dentist. Many issues, such as teeth stains, tooth decay, and periodontal disease, are more easily treated at their earliest stages than in their later stages of development.
• What are the Consequences of Late Detection? You want to receive the proper restorative or preventative care earlier than later, when you might have to resort to expensive dental implant treatment or use temporary dentures with dental bonding agents. After all, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
• The Importance of Preventing Periodontal Disease: Periodontal disease can happen due to plaque and tartar buildup along your gum line that results in untreated gum disease. Gingivitis is preventable through home oral care and the right diet (cut your sugars). You still need dental checkup visits for additional support.
• It’s Essential to Prevent Dental Tooth Decay: Tooth decay or dental cavities/caries occur when the teeth enamel or its outer shell starts eroding due to acids from bacteria and plaque. Plaque is essentially food particles from food and drinks being gathered together by bacteria on your enamel, with acid being their waste products.
• The Consequences of Tooth Decay Neglect: You want early detection of tooth decay to prevent it from worsening or to restore teeth as holes or dental caries from on the weakened enamel. If it gets truly worse, you’ll need to pay more to restore the tooth, like getting crowns or veneers as well as doing endodontic (root canal) treatment.
• Keep Your Teeth Looking Amazing: The cosmetic benefits of a checkup cannot be denied. If you’re brushing, flossing, and gargling with mouthwash regularly, your dentist can see it at your every visit. The prophylaxis or teeth cleaning you do in-office is also more thorough at plaque removal than daily brushing.
• The Routine Cleaning Procedure is a Must: Prophylaxis is a must for your teeth not only to make it easier for the dentist to see any hidden or forming dental caries. He can’t make a good assessment of your oral health with your teeth being filled with plaque and tartar. He’s particularly adept at tartar removal.
• Tartar Buildup is Hard to Brush Away: Once plaque hardens into tartar or calculus (not the math subject, but instead plaque with calcium deposits to protect it), the safest way to remove it from your enamel and along the gum line is through specialized dental equipment like metal picks and scrapers.
• Dental Whitening Might Also Be Included: You might also be penciled in for dental whitening or bleaching to remove existing teeth stains. Of course, if you regularly brush your teeth and get routine checkups, you’re less likely to develop such stains in the first place. Your dentist will make the recommendation depending on the state of your teeth.

As the turn of the phrase goes, there might be no use crying over spilled milk but there is more than one way to prevent that milk from spilling in the first place, starting with self-awareness.

What to Expect from Your Dental Appointments

The reason why regular dental visits are emphasized almost as much as daily tooth hygiene is because most people only go to the dentist when they experience pain from cavities or loose teeth from periodontal disease.

Dental visits can also expose underlying issues you can’t detect on your own through home oral examinations, such as x-rays revealing deep gum pockets that indicate progressing periodontal disease.

• Why Prevention is Better Than the Cure: Prevention is better than the cure or an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure because the bare minimum of preventative effort will pay dividends on the expensive cures, you’ll avoid from preventing your dental issues from worsening.

  When you make dental appointments after the problem has worsened, expect a bigger bill to pay. Otherwise, it might be time to look into dental tourism to save money on operations like endodontic treatments and dental implants. Maintaining regular visits to your local dental center also ensures shorter visits and fewer problems.

• Check for Mouth Cancer: One of the most important things your dentist will do every checkup is to check for signs of mouth cancer. They’ll do exams about the issue for your own safety. They’ll even check for signs of neck and head cancer for good measure. It’s better to be safe than to be sorry.

  They’ll basically feel around for any lumps on your neck and head as well as lumps inside your mouth’s soft tissue that aren’t just canker sores. They’ll specifically scan for white or red patches as well. Usually, these checks will result in nothing unusual found, but you never know and it’s better to see any cancer tumors in advance.

• World-Class Dental Hygienists and Therapists: You can get world-class or internationally trained dental hygienists at the Thantakit Dental Center if ever you were to decide to get a more affordable dental checkup here in Thailand while on vacation. Dental hygienists and therapists should not be overlooked in terms of oral health.

  These professionals are dependable not only for their in-office service but also for their dental advice. Hygienists, as their name suggests, deal with hygiene or the lack thereof, thus requiring treatment. Therapists offer a wider range of dental care that includes checkups, fillings, and pediatric dentistry too.

• Deep Cleaning Services for Periodontal Disease Available: Hygienists are specialists when it comes to preventative dental health as well as gum disease treatment. They’ll specifically show you the correct home care for gingivitis and assist you in keeping gums and teeth healthy.

  They offer specialized assistance when it comes to teeth cleaning, specifically deep cleaning that involves polishing the enamel and scaling diseased parts of the tooth root along with tartar and plaque to promote healing. This reverses tooth decay and keeps gum disease from progressing.

• Detect any Underlying Concerns: Dental hygienists doing dental cleaning also checking up your teeth in a way. Some issues don’t become clear until every last bit of plaque and tartar is removed from your teeth. They also typically recommend getting dental x-rays once a year.

  Aside from oral examinations, x-rays show if you have any underlying concerns that might otherwise go unnoticed, such as teeth impaction, bone loss from your jaw, and so forth. There are many issues that these professionals inspect during the checkup, oral exam, and cleaning that you can’t detect on your own until it’s too late.

• Catching Issues Early Before They Worsen: Dental checkups allow dentists to catch things (diseases or conditions like an impacted wisdom tooth) early or prevent them from happening in the first place. Sure, you can use a mirror to see the state of your teeth by yourself.

  However, it takes a professional to truly know what’s wrong with your teeth, gums, oral soft tissue, lips, mouth, jaw, and so forth before you start experiencing pain from them. Dentists aren’t just problem solvers. They’re also problem averters.

• Proactively Protect Your Oral Health: A dentist can spot dental decay and gum disease from a mile away, so to speak. If you want to preserve your oral health, you should go about things in a proactive way. That’s the true value of dental checkups twice a year or every season.

  Dentists can also provide specific advice and help with your daily oral health needs. Instead of turning towards the Internet or visiting the Mayo Clinic for advice on dental healthcare, you should “indulge” yourself and spend money on professional advice catered specifically to your needs.

• Avoid Internet-Based Misinformation on Remedies: Even though the Internet is filled with informative content about dental health and upkeep, such as this article, it can also be filled with misinformation and dangerous ill-informed advice that could do you more harm than good.

  A professional can have his practice revoked by spreading lies about dentistry, so there’s some insurance for them to professionally uphold their ethics. They’ve also been trained for years—in the case of Thantakit dentists, internationally by world-class schools—to be qualified as dental professionals.

• A Guide and a Helping Guide Toward Dental Health: Regular checkups serve as your map towards oral healthiness or your GPS towards the Land of Smiles (not to be confused with Thailand, although it does have a robust dental tourism scene that let it earn such a moniker).

  Well-trained dentists give you guidance you can trust because it’s paid for and he’s board certified to practice dentistry (as opposed to forum posts with sourceless anecdotes, and hearsay). Visiting your dentist regularly allows you to build a good relationship and rapport with him to ensure you tailored dental advice for years to come.

• Consultations about Teeth Whitening: Teeth whitening or bleaching have become hugely popular recently, but as in the last 20 years kind of recent. However, there are plenty of myths and false information regarding what’s safe to do to whiten your teeth and what’s unsafe or even downright illegal.

  The dentist should be able to figure out whether you’re a good candidate for tooth whitening or not. People with sensitive teeth are discouraged from undergoing this procedure. You should also go for legitimate means of professional whitening to prevent side effects like developing thinner enamel or sensitive teeth.

Before getting your teeth whitened, it’s best to consult with a dentist first or undergo a preliminary dental checkup. Some people are advised not to undergo whitening due to the state of their enamel or because other dental treatments might prove more effective in whitening their teeth.

What to Look for When it Comes to Dentists

The best dental clinics and centers will find the right time for you to come in and get prepped. They’ll have you scheduled at your most convenient time, and they’ll even happily answer all your questions. You want the checkup to be done by a friendly dental team, of course.

A dentist is the best person to keep you updated on the state of your oral health. Your regular dentist should also have your dental records on hand; thus, they know your entire history.

You can also avail yourself of specialists to handle your dental care instead of a general practitioner dentist. In terms of dental hygiene and checkups, the specialists to look out for are dental hygienists and dental therapists. They do cleanings and give oral hygiene advice.

Some even practice preventive dentistry or dentistry designed to specifically prevent or avoid serious dental conditions like periodontitis or tooth root inflammation.

Schedule a Routine Dental Checkup Today

Having a dentist to regularly turn to for checkups ensures you’ll have someone in mind to call when you have concerns about your mouth and teeth, especially if they’re the ones who did your filling or crown installment in the first place.

If you can afford to get a better dentist than the one you have right now, they should be able to keep your teeth and gum health in check with better equipment and tech.

Call your local dentist or get a Thailand wellness vacation at Thantakit Dental Center to schedule a checkup today. It’s also possible for you to make that dental tourism trip to Thailand in case your family dentist has detected an impacted tooth and you can’t afford to do the surgery locally.

Take Care of Your Oral Health

Even though some fear going to the dentist, there’s some cost-effective and dependable dental care teams you can rely on, like those found in Thailand through dental tourism.

The key to maintaining both your oral health and overall health is getting regular preventative dental checkups. They’re preventative in that they tell dentists when something is amiss before they get truly worse, like in the case of cavity formation.

Furthermore, you’ll also be assisted in the prevention of various dental diseases such as tooth decay, gum or periodontal disease, and even oral cancer. The pain and expensiveness of a disease that you’ve neglected to treat earlier are staggering, to say the least!

Thantakit International Dental Center is Thailand’s longest established dental center. Situated in Bangkok, our clinic is renowned across the world as a destination for world-class dentistry, with most of our patients flying to us from Australia.

Just contact us today and get a FREE dental consultation.