Dentist Blog

Having great oral health doesn't just mean keeping your teeth clean and free from disease, as healthy gums are absolutely essential. Unless your gums are healthy they won't be able to do their job of keeping your teeth firmly in place, and you'll be at risk of losing teeth. As any dentist in Fishkill will tell you, gum disease is the most common cause of tooth loss in the world.

There's nothing complicated about getting and keeping healthy gums, as all it takes is a few minutes a day. All you have to do is ensure you brush your teeth twice a day, spending at least 2 minutes each time, and that you always floss once-a-day.

Oral hygiene is crucial for all stages of life, from birth to old age. The elderly need to visit the Fishkiill dentist at least two times each year, just as children and younger adults do. Even elderly individuals who do not have a complete set of natural teeth benefit from visits to the Fishkill dentist. These visits are for all facets of dental health. During routine care visits the dentist in Fishkill screens for cancer, checks for infection, and can even make sure that dentures fit properly.

One significant reason that oral hygiene is so important for the elderly is that they are already at a higher risk for certain disorders and poor oral health simply adds to this issue. Individuals with oral health problems are more likely to develop meningitis, cancer, stroke, and heart attack. A recent study even showed that having a single oral health worker on staff at nursing homes was related to a significant decrease in the number of patients who developed pneumonia every year.

What if simply cleaning your infant's gums with a xylitol wipe every afternoon before bed could help to decrease the odds of them acquiring cavities later in life? According to Dr. Ling Zhan of the University of California at San Francisco, that could be all that is required. Recently, pediatric dentist, professor, and researcher Dr. Zhan spent time studying 44 families where children from the ages of 6-35 months were given either a xylitol wipe or a placebo wipe twice everyday for a year.

What Dr. Zhan's study uncovered is that the children who underwent the xylitol wipes were far less likely to develop cavities as their teeth developed. This even applied to the very young children who had their gums wiped before their teeth had even erupted. This study suggests that xylitol could be the key to reducing the epidemic of tooth decay in young children. As a Fishkill dentist who routinely sees many pediatric patients, I find this information to be fantastic news.

Lately, there's more and more of a buzz about alternative medicine in the United States. The United States is specified here because many countries that are considered a few centuries or so behind in technological advancement and general industrial development benefiting their entire nation are actually ahead of us in the use of alternative, mostly homeopathic medicine. We must understand that all medicinal remedies, at one point, came from the natural world. It's all we had. Everything we used to relieve pain, to boost health, to add nutrients, etc., all of it came mostly from plant life. Even the pills and other medicines given to us by our general physicians in this day and age had it's original form in plant life. This is where some people might say that we have stumbled. Today's medicinal remedies are synthetically manufactured, getting away from the more original plant-based form. This is true in almost all health care remedies or medicines, even dentistry to a certain extent.

So this begs the question, is there such a thing as alternative dentistry? Yes there is! What does that entail, then? I'll tell you! This approach to dentistry is based on holistic principles and therapies. Holistic dentists believe that the general health of the mouth is not separate from the general health of the person.

• The physical and mental state of the person will affect dental health, and vice versa.
• It recognizes that dental disease may be a cause or a result of other ailments.
• Diet is very important to oral health.
• Nutritional healing and diet control are important in the holistic approach to healing.
• Nutritional healing is based on the use of vitamins, minerals, herbs and food supplements.