Preventive Dentistry

The big advantage of being a family dental practice with a bias to preventive dental disease is that it has enabled us to stop the problems of one generation being carried through to the next.

We care for people literally from the cradle to the grave.

Children

Two years of age is an important milestone, we are always happy to see a younger baby or to give advice however, at two children are starting to become more adventurous and socialised. They should have a complement of twenty “baby” teeth and decay free. This allow us to form a friendly relationship so that the child becomes used to having its teeth and mouth examined. Thus if the unfortunate happens, and believe you me a lot of toddlers fall over and knock teeth, we have the trust in place to access any damage and take any appropriate actions without it being a scary incident.

We see child patients every four months from aged two so that they get used to visiting at Carlton House Dental. This build the trust and we very rarely have a problem with nervousness. However we do appreciate that nerves can be a problem and that this can be generated by a bad dental experience, so we concentrate on making it fun and can nearly always delay a procedure should it be in the patient’s best interest. In fact we normally find that our children are fine and it is still a few adults that bear the scars of previous dentistry often from decades beforehand. We like and enjoy practising gentle dentistry.

Between the ages of five and six just a child will have its adult teeth emerging and they are most cooperative in allowing us to risk assess them. Really all we do is collect a sample of saliva and thoroughly clean their teeth. Twenty four hours later we bring them back in and using a harmless food dye colour the bacteria on the teeth and count how many surfaces are coated with bacteria. The saliva sample is used to grow the natural bacteria present in the mouth and form this we can ascertain the child’s risk from tooth decay.

Using a scheme called Denplan Care for children we set up regular hygienist appointments to keep the risk under control. The dentist monitors the child’s development and intervenes using appropriate preventative measures such as fissure sealant to keep decay away.

All the time that the child is developing the hygienist is monitoring teaching and advising the child how to maintain healthy teeth and just as importantly gums.
The dentists regard part of their normal role as closely monitoring the natural development and will intervene as appropriate should a problem start to develop and the child need orthodontic braces, or referral to a specialist.

Around about the age of twelve gum disease can start, we would not recommend an electric toothbrush below this age as everyone should be able to use a manual brush. You never know when you might need to use one? Scout camp, Back packing, or just a good old Power-cut.

Most corrective orthodontics is started at about the age of eleven years for girls and up to about fourteen on boys, this is because boys have slower physical development.

Our aim is to get your child to adulthood with as few fillings as possible and ideally none.

Adults:

We reassess your risk using the Previser system ever two to three years and generate an Oral Health Score, which is a percentage to show you how healthy you are and show where the focus of improving your own dental health needs to be.

You can check out your own risk be going to the following website:
https://apps.previser.com/ukdeppa/stephencuthew/

We use two schemes Denplan Care and Essentials to allow our patients to have regular hygienist and dentist visits. 

Denplan is a scheme that is fair to the patient and the dentist. The main reason why we love it here at Carlton House Dental is that it allows us to practice preventive dentistry, keep up to date on all aspects of dental advancement and education.