Dental Care for Moms-To-Be

Over the past few weeks, we've covered the basics of dental care for children 0-30. But what about kids up to -9 months old? You can actually use oral health techniques to the benefit of a child in utero -- by taking care of your own mouth. Studies have shown that poor oral health in mothers has a noticeable negative effect on their babies' health. So what do pregnant women need to do differently than everyone else?

Tell Your Dentist Immediately
Your dentist ought to know the day you know that you're pregnant. (So should your family doctor, of course.) That's because some relatively-common dental routines, such as the use of tetracycline, can negatively affect a baby's growth and should be stopped immediately. Tell your doctor right away so he or she can modify your routine accordingly. Also tell your dentist about any new medicines your doctor has put you on, to avoid any possible counter-indicated drugs or procedures.

When to Avoid the Dentist
There are two very critical periods in the development of any child in which it's wise for the mother to avoid basically any non-critical messing about with her body, including the dentist. The first is the first trimester -- all of it -- and the second is the latter half of the third trimester. The second trimester is safe for most regular dental operations, but any surgery requiring anesthesia or X-rays and any elective procedure should be delayed until after the baby is born unless they threaten your life.

Morning Sickness
Purchase a bland-tasting toothpaste to avoid triggering your morning sickness every time you brush, and a bland mouthwash for rinsing your mouth with should you be unable to avoid vomiting. Always rinse your mouth with something -- even if it's just water -- after you vomit, or the acids from your stomach will sit in your mouth and wreak havoc on your teeth.

Swollen Gums and Other Complications
If you experience swollen gums, pregnancy-related gingivitis, or other oral complications of pregnancy, don't let it keep you from taking care of your mouth. Consider switching to a softer toothbrush, milder toothpaste, and/or waxed floss in order to keep your routine going. Make sure you avoid sugary foods as they only add to the swelling and the sensitivity of your teeth. As soon as you're out of the hospital with your newborn baby, schedule an appointment for you to see your dentist.

For as long as your baby is breastfeeding, your diet directly affects his/her immediate and future oral health -- so stay off the sweets and load up on the fruits and veggies. The little one might not be able to thank you, but you'll thank yourself in a few years when your child's perfect smile begins to show.

The Best Dental Care for Kids Happens At Home

At Dr. Eric Johnson's office, we believe that visits to the dentist are an important part of oral healthcare -- but they're clearly only one small part. Most oral health care happens at home, and it often starts with Mom.

Once your child turns six, it's time to switch to a fluoridated toothpaste. Fluoridated toothpastes go a long way toward preventing cavities, and at six, your child's body is developed enough that fluoride overdose isn't a significant danger. (That said, if you know you have fluoridated water and your child drinks it regularly, you might want to be careful to use small amounts of toothpaste -- it doesn't take much to take effect.)

Proper Nutrition
Between the ages of three and thirty, kids have a tendency to be very vulnerable to the allure of sugar and other highly-processed carbohydrate-laden foods. Candy, muffins, anything made by Hostess or Little Debbie -- you know the stuff. No one is saying they shouldn't enjoy a treat, but part of your responsibility as a parent is making sure that they don't eat too much of the stuff, or too regularly.

From just a dentist's perspective, sugary and floury foods like that are profoundly detrimental to your kid's oral health. Sugars that sit in the mouth encourage bacteria to reproduce exponentially, which in turn leads to plaque, gingivitis, and periodontal disease. (Other health professionals can give you plenty of other reasons to avoid these foods as well).

For best oral health, make certain your child eats at least three different colors of fruit and/or vegetable every day, and not the same three colors day after day. This simple rule will go a long way toward making sure your kid gets a broad spectrum of nutrients, all of which affect his/her oral health directly or indirectly.

Adding To the Routine
As your child grows, you can add a few new elements to their dental routine. At six, add mouthwash. Go straight for the good stuff -- Crest Pro Health which is a great mouth rinse without the alcohol and it won't dry your mouth. Listerine is a classic but it is too strong. As soon as your child starts losing his/her baby teeth, teach them how to floss and enforce flossing each night before bedtime. This will get them well into the habit by the time their adult molars start coming in.

Being a mom is certainly unending hard work -- and taking care of your child's oral health is just one part of the job. But making it part of your daily routine is the key to getting it all under control.

Dental Care for Toddlers -- Mom's Role

Obviously, once a child starts getting teeth in, it's important to bring them to see the dentist at least every six months. The dentist's role in checking up on the toddler's teeth is pretty obvious -- but first-time parents may well ask themselves where their part in their child's dental care is.

The answer is actually pretty simple, too. It's largely a matter of instruction, routine, and observation.

Instruction
The first step in toddler dental care is teaching them how to take care of their own teeth. By the time a child is three, they should be able to at least pretend to brush their teeth. Your job as the mom is to turn that pretend tooth brushing into the real thing. That means teaching them the same basic technique described last week -- but as toddlers who actually have teeth, you want to increase the amount of time they spend on each surface from 2 seconds to 4.

It should take about a minute and a half to brush your teeth -- for second on each of the 24 surfaces inside your mouth. That's 12 on the top (three for each of the two molar surfaces, two for each of the two canine areas, and two for the front teeth), and 12 on the bottom.

Routine
Your second job is to make sure that your toddler brushes their teeth every morning when they wake up and every night right before they go to sleep. If you want to make this easy on yourself, start the routine the day they start eating non-breast-milk foods (see last week's post) and don't vary the routine ever. Kids love routines, and if you get it into their head early, they'll actually remind YOU that they need their teeth brushed.

Observation
The last thing you need to do as the mom is keep track of your child's dental and oral health. Watch to see if they suddenly start favoring one side of their mouth over the other, if they start talking differently (which can be a sign of pain in one part of the mouth), or if they start being distressed at eating particularly hot, cold, or chewy foods. If you catch any of these or any other sign that they may have a problem with their mouths, schedule an appointment with their dentist immediately.

Happy Mother's Day!

Anniversary Party II: Son of Dental Care!

This May is going to be a month of celebration at Dr. Eric Johnson's office. On Thursday, June 7th, we're having an open house in celebration of the second anniversary of Dr. Johnson's arrival, as well as the newly minted merger with Dr. Risbrudt. Details on our web site here. We also think moms deserve more than one day of appreciation, so all May long, we're going to be celebrating the moms out there with flowers -- and we're dedicating our blog this month especially to information about dental care for mothers and babies. To that end, let's talk infants.

Do You Need 'Dental' Care Before You Have Teeth?
The short answer is 'not at first'. In general, a baby that is consuming solely breast milk and water doesn't need much by way of oral care; the breast milk itself acts to protect the baby's mouth and gums. It's only once a baby starts eating other foods that you have to be concerned with oral care.

We all recognize in adults that sugar from any source is problematic for oral health for a variety of reasons. What we don't all realize is that many foods that are designed for toothless babies are sugary (after all, sugar dissolves in their mouths, so it's easy to eat with no teeth.) This includes foods that don't explicitly have sugar, but are made from finely-ground grains (which actually break down into sugars upon exposure to saliva.)

That means that once your child begins eating non-breast-milk foods, whether it's formula, rice cereal, arrowroot cookies, or a nice rare steak, it's up to you to make sure they maintain good oral health. Start brushing their teeth once each day, with a child-sized soft (that's a technical term, look for an "S" or the word "soft" on the package) toothbrush.

Use a tiny (grain-of-rice sized) amount of non-fluoridated toothpaste -- it's hard to find in major shopping chains, but it's not too tough to order online. Brush for two seconds on each surface of the gums (the inside, outside, and top of the molar area, and the inside and outside of the canine area and the front-most gums.)

Do this every day as part of getting ready for bed. Sleeping time is the time when the mouth is left alone for the longest, so it's the time when the bacteria in the mouth have the longest to multiply and become problematic. Brushing right before bed is the best way to keep that time as short as possible and thus minimize the chances of a problem developing.

So what about kids who have that full set of teeth? Come back next week and find out!

How to Prevent Oral Cancer

Oral cancer, like most cancers, is one of the preponderance of medical conditions where an ounce of prevention really is worth several metric tons of cure. And while Oral Cancer Awareness Month may be rapidly approaching its end, there still may be time for the responsible folks out there to schedule an appointment with Dr. Eric Johnson's office to get a free oral cancer screening.

For those of you who are confident enough to go without, however, we have a bit of parting advice for you -- our best understanding of how to make sure that oral cancer never affects your mouth.

The best bit of advice is to stop aging. Of course, that has its own negative side effects depending on how you go about it. They range from having to drink blood to having a bunch of other immortals try to cut your head off with swords...so that's probably not really a good option. Let's move on with some more realistic steps you can take.

First, avoid tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs. Basically anything that can actually get into your individual cells and mess them up from the inside -- which all of the above really do -- should be on your 'do not' list.

Second, eat a varied diet that includes at least three different colors of fruit and/or veggie with every meal. Different colors mean different beneficial nutrients, so by switching up the spectrum, you're ensuring that your body gets the variety it needs to function properly. Also, most brightly-colored plant life is antioxidant, meaning it fights cancer's earliest stages.

Third, protect yourself from the sun. Oral cancer can spring up inside your mouth because you get too much UVB on the outside of your lips, jaw, and neck -- so get out the sunscreen.

Finally, get yourself screened for oral cancer! Even the best preventative efforts can fail for no apparent reason -- so make sure you don't have oral cancer by letting the professionals check for it. The earlier it's discovered, the easier it is to treat, so get examined at least once a year. And since it's free this month, now's as good a time as any to get it done, don't you think?

April is Oral Cancer Awareness Month! Are You Aware?

Oral cancer doesn't get a lot of play. It's not as lethal as pancreatic cancer, as dramatic as brain cancer, or as commercialized as lung cancer -- but it's pretty nasty stuff nonetheless. Dr. Eric Johnson's office is acknowledging Oral Cancer Awareness Month by offering free oral cancer screenings to anyone willing to make an appointment to see us.

But how do you know if you should come in and get checked?

The obvious answer is "if you have a mouth, you should get checked." But we realize that that won't fly with everyone out there, so here are a dozen other things your body may be telling you that indicate it's particularly worthwhile to schedule a visit.

1. If you're 60 years of age or more, you should definitely get checked.
2. If you smoke(d) or use(d) tobacco for more than a month within the last decade.
3. If you regularly (once a week or more) drink enough alcohol to feel tipsy.
4. If you've been diagnosed with HPV.
5. If you have red and/or white patches on the inside of your lips or cheeks.
6. If you have a lip that's been sore for more than a few days.
7. If you have unexplained bleeding inside your mouth.
8. If one or more of your teeth are inexplicably loose.
9. If you have difficulty or pain when swallowing, especially rough foods.
10. If you have a lump in your neck and you don't know where it came from.
11. If you have a pain that feels like its midway between your ears and your jawbone.
12. If your retainers, dentures or partials have started to feel like they don't fit.

Any of these things can indicate the onset of oral cancer. If you have more than two of them, getting checked for oral cancer should be very high on your list of things to do. Call or come in to Dr. Johnson's office today and make an appointment for your free oral cancer screening -- you've only got until the end of April to get it done for free, so hurry!

What to Expect During an Oral Cancer Exam

Dentists and dental hygienists are quite used to poking around inside people's mouths, and Dr. Johnson and his assistants are no exception. Our vast experience in this area puts us in a unique position to see things going on inside your mouth that few other people can -- things like the beginnings of oral cancer.

An effective oral cancer screening requires a hands-on approach, because some lumps are too small or well-concealed to be visible with the naked eye (and those little mirrors on sticks). Here's what to expect when you come in for an oral cancer check.

• First, we'll ask you to remove any dentures, partials, piercings, grills, or other mouthware you may commonly use.
  
• Next, we'll visually inspect your face, neck, lips, jaw, and mouth for any visible abnormalities. There are lots of things that fall into this category, from obvious lumps to subtle open sores to a simple asymmetry of the mouth.
  
• We'll also listen to your speech for signs of slurring or other indications that perhaps there is a sensitive area or a malformation somewhere along your gum line or tongue.
  
• Then, we'll feel along your neck and your jawline for any bumps that were too small or hidden to see.
  
• And we'll follow that up by feeling along your lips and along the insides of your cheeks.
  
• The tongue comes next. First we'll ask you to stick it out and we'll look at the top and bottom. Then, we'll gently pull your tongue out, squeeze it a little, and then move it around a bit so we can get a clean look at the sides and bottom.
  
• With our mirrors, we'll carefully examine the roof and floor of your mouth.
  
• Finally, we'll feel the roof and floor of your mouth, again looking for any bumps that our visual inspection missed.
  

If we find anything in this examination, we may recommend you get a biopsy so that we know exactly what we're dealing with. It's a simple, 20-minute procedure that we're offering free all this month. So come on in and get 'poked and prodded' — all for a good cause — your own health.