Do you really know how to take care of your oral health? Caring for your teeth is essential for maintaining a beautiful smile and ensuring overall well-being. A proper oral hygiene routine is the first step.
Taking care of your teeth isn't just about aesthetics, but also about quality of life. Therefore, maintaining this simple practice can result in stronger teeth, healthy gums, and a healthier, more confident life.
Understand what truly makes a difference when presenting results during a routine dental checkup. Yes, in an ideal world, people should only go to the dentist to check on their oral health.
How to take care of your oral health?
I want to make this article one of the most important on this site in terms of connecting the dots. This article has several links that lead to other articles that expand on and explain the concepts and relationships of the factors that can contribute to or hinder oral health.
Starting with prevention – the starting point for addressing the subject – you need to understand the mechanism of how oral diseases develop, understand what the determining factor is for the development of the disease, and distinguish between disease-causing factors and disease-promoting factors. Knowing these mechanisms helps you in your daily choices regarding food, what times and types of food to eat – but most importantly: how to clean your teeth? How often? What to use when cleaning them?
It's crucial to make it very clear that there's no magic toothbrush, infallible toothpaste, or even a super mouthwash that can replace effective oral hygiene. And don't think I can explain it all in two paragraphs either. The important question is: how do you use these tools?
Tooth decay
Dental caries, also known as tooth decay or caries, is an infectious and destructive disease that affects the teeth. It is characterized by the demineralization of tooth enamel, the outermost protective layer of the teeth. Although most explanations and answers relate to the action of bacteria present in the mouth, the core of the problem lies in the failure of the so-called Demineralization-Remineralization mechanism, which will be explained below.
What causes cavities?
In academic circles, caries is defined as a multifactorial disease that causes the loss of minerals from enamel and dentin due to an imbalance in the calcium ion exchange mechanism – Demineralization/Remineralization.
How does this happen?
Since the pH of the mouth (an index that measures the alkalinity or acidity of a medium) has an ideal value for stability, but undergoes constant fluctuations, there is a natural mechanism for replenishing calcium on the surface of the teeth through saliva renewal. Think about and work towards maintaining the pH of your mouth alkaline or neutral.
For example, as food or drinks arrive, or as factors from the individual themselves alter the oral environment, making it more acidic (low pH), the salivary glands immediately begin to work, releasing renewed amounts of saliva into the mouth, which function to bring the pH back up, making it more alkaline. And why is this important? Because when saliva is acidic, it causes calcium loss from the teeth.
How to take care of your oral health?
The cycle of the Demineralization-Remineralization mechanism.
Low (acidic) pH causes calcium loss from the surface of teeth. When we drink soda, orange juice, or wine, the pH of our mouth becomes acidic (reaching 3, 3.5, or 4). During this time, calcium ions are lost from the tooth into the saliva. The tooth loses calcium – gradually, salivary exchanges neutralize this acidity, and the pH rises until it reaches a normal pH, which would be between 6.5 and 7.5. Upon reaching this value, the movement of calcium ions reverses, and the teeth begin a process of replacing the lost calcium. Ideally, the pH should remain at these levels most of the time to allow for this return of calcium to the teeth and a healthy stability of the environment.
How long does it take for this cycle to complete?
It's important to remember that it takes a certain amount of time for saliva to neutralize the acidity generated by such foods. Perhaps 30 minutes? This means that if, after 30 minutes, the individual ingests another acidic beverage, there will be another 30 minutes of low pH. Therefore, if this continues indefinitely, the teeth will continue to suffer the effect of calcium mineral loss. Therefore, we will never have a complete closure of this cycle, which will lead to an imbalance that favors the appearance of cavities.
Where do bacteria fit into this mechanism?
If the salivary buffering mechanism continues to act naturally, the tooth will hardly suffer losses to the point of producing a cavity. The role of bacteria in tooth decay is that, far beyond the moment of the sudden drop in pH from ingesting orange juice, the existence of a layer of bacterial plaque covering the teeth and hiding some enamel surfaces, in addition to preventing the buffering of acidity in these areas, will increase and prolong, if not maintain, this movement of calcium loss for as long as they are covering the teeth.
These bacteria feed on sugars and carbohydrates present in the diet, producing acids that remove calcium ions and attack tooth enamel over time. They can then continue working undisturbed for days until they produce a dull white spot on the enamel surface, the next stage being the formation of a cavity. In other words, the well-known tooth decay lesion.
How to take care of your oral health?
What happens when you ignore a cavity?
If you don't treat tooth decay, it can progress to deeper layers of the tooth, reaching the dentin and eventually the dental pulp, where living cells, blood vessels, and nerve fibers are found. This infection causes intense pain and can spread to surrounding tissues.
Treatment for tooth decay usually involves removing the damaged part of the tooth and filling the resulting cavity with restorative materials such as resin or amalgam. In more advanced cases, further procedures may be necessary. sugarcane treatmentor, as a last resort, extract the affected tooth.
Effective prevention necessarily involves proper brushing and flossing, with the main goal of eliminating as much bacterial plaque as possible. We will delve deeper into the subject of flossing in another article. In this text, we will focus on the correct way to use a toothbrush. What would that method be? Even among researchers, there are disagreements, so much so that different brushing techniques have been developed.
How to take care of your oral health?
4 Brushing Techniques
The four most well-known brushing techniques are Charters, Fones, Stilmann, and Bass. They were devised by masters of dentistry, each technique developed based on slightly divergent ideas about the effect of the bristles on teeth and gums, and also divergent ideas about where the factor to be removed is located: the plaque containing the bacteria that cause disease.
What is the best brushing technique?
We can even say that some of these techniques may work better for some individuals and not for others. One of these techniques works best while a patient is wearing orthodontic braces. At another time we can explain the form, principles and objectives of each of these techniques. But I can state, based on the literature, that under normal conditions, which would represent the vast majority of individuals, the best brushing technique is the Bass brushing technique.
The contributions of the Bass Technique
When we understand the principles that make this technique the most effective, it's possible to deduce that if we apply these principles to the other 3 techniques, mixing Bass with each of the 3, in the end little difference will be perceived and the result will be similar among the 4 techniques.
I don't mean mixing all four techniques into one. I mean Bass x Headphones, or Bass x Charters, or Bass x Stillman. For that, it's important to know the bass technique, and by knowing the bass technique, you can stick with just that.
In the article The Bass Brushing Technique There is a complete description. There is not enough space in this text to go into detail.
Read, learn, memorize, put it into practice, make it part of your brushing routine.
The Ideal World
So when an individual learns to use Bass, their life will consist of visiting the dentist to check their health, not just to fill a hole at each appointment. Furthermore, if you have regular dental checkups such as interproximal radiographs and periodontal probing, this will help you avoid expensive treatments in the future.
Dentists use interproximal radiographs to search for hidden cavities between teeth. They are also used to examine the health of the interdental bone crests. Loss of height in these crests may indicate periodontal disease or even some type of occlusal trauma. Periodontal probing will identify gingivitis or the presence of periodontal pockets.
How to take care of your oral health?
Control of bacterial plaque.
There is also plaque visualization. After the patient has already started practicing the Bass technique, the dentist uses a dye that shows the areas where plaque accumulates, therefore places where the patient is not able to brush.
Thus, by alerting the client to these locations, both parties discuss what could be done to correct the problem. This could be simply a correction or adjustment to the technique, or the introduction of... some tool that contributes to achieving the desired result. At each plate control session, a record is made in the form of an index for future comparisons (plate index).
Furthermore, moderation in the consumption of sugars and acidic foods completes the cycle that includes the solution to most oral problems.
The fact is that the almost infinite variety of problems that would necessitate a dentist's intervention would be due to anatomical problems linked to genetics or to... development (such as those related to orthodontic solutions), which include agenesis, accidents and their consequences such as fractures, and a wide variety of aesthetic solutions. Calculus removal, cleanings.
Dentistry is a profession that works against itself.
Ultimately, this may seem like a grand utopia, and we could even say somewhat paradoxical for dentists, but that is the goal of the profession: to ensure that everyone has good health.
Finally, what I can tell you is that there are patients who return to the clinics year after year to complete the protocol. Examination, plaque disclosure, and cleaning, and… see you in a year!
How to take care of your oral health?
If every time you go to the dentist it's just to fill another cavity, something is wrong. You need to identify the deficiency and change it. Know that Scandinavian countries have achieved the best oral health standards in the world. There, dentists work with an emphasis on prevention. They treat patients who simply don't have cavities.
Read the description of Bass Brushing Technique And also read about the use of dental floss.
Author: Nivaldo Pinho Gonçalves, Periodontist, CROSC 9696.
Suggested Reading https://www.scielo.br/j/dpress/a/4G4SMnBnHzyvvbFNqVK9DWL/?lang=pt