Preventive Dentistry in Phoenix, AZ
You’ve no doubt heard it said that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In dentistry, you might say it’s worth two pounds. Maybe even thousands of dollars. That’s because dental problems can become exponentially more expensive — and painful — the longer they go unaddressed. Fortunately, modern dentistry has many easy and relatively inexpensive ways to make sure that today’s minor annoyance does not turn into tomorrow’s major headache.
Preventive dentistry describes all the procedures used to arrest tooth decay and other diseases in the earliest stages. The goal is to keep you as healthy as possible and maintain your natural teeth for life.
Even if you brush and floss your teeth faithfully, it is important that you have your teeth professionally cleaned on a regular basis. (Of course, if you aren’t quite so meticulous about your oral hygiene, it’s even more important!) After a thorough cleaning, your teeth will feel smooth and squeaky-clean, and they will probably look a lot brighter too. But professional teeth cleanings aren’t done for looks alone.
X-ray imaging has come a long way since films were bathed in developer and fixer and hung to dry. The fully digitized equipment at CenterCare, along with our computers, allows manipulation and examination of the x-ray image to give us insights we never had. Amazingly, while the precision has increased, the radiation has decreased! Our technology ensures that our Phoenix patients are exposed to minimal radiation, much less than the x-ray film used before.
While you may think that some loss of teeth is inevitable with aging, it is actually possible for all of your teeth to last a lifetime. One of the ways you can achieve this goal is to avoid periodontal disease (“peri” – around; “odont” – tooth), which is caused by bacteria that attack the tissues around the teeth. Unfortunately, you may not even realize you have gum disease as the signs and symptoms are not always as apparent to you as they are to a dental professional.
Oral cancer comprises 6% of all cancers and ranks 6th in risk. At CenterCare, the oral exam always includes a visual check for cancer.
CenterCare has added a cancer detection tool that is considered state of the art in non-biopsy cancer detection. It uses technology called bio-fluorescence. When light strikes any object, much of it is reflected, and this is most of what we see with our eyes. If that object absorbs the light energy it can re-emit it as a different wavelength. This is called fluorescence and has been developed for use in healthcare to identify abnormal tissue.