Children & Bad Breath, Part II

When is the best time to take your child to the dentist? According to parents, it's winter. This is a time when the child has gotten used to his or her school routine. Many parents agree, according to a survey done by a dental care advocacy group, Oral Health America. Their survey showed that 63 percent of parents feel that taking their children to the dentist close to the beginning of the academic school year is either extremely or very important. This is a way to get kids ready to go back to school with a clean bill of dental health, thus avoiding problems such as cavities, bad breath and gum disease. Eighty-nine percent of parents surveyed also believe that regular trips to the dentist are vital to their children's overall good health. The survey conducted by Oral Health America was done as part of the group's Fall for Smiles campaign. It is a campaign that hopes to connect communities to resources that can help them improve overall oral health.

Monitoring your child's (or children's) oral health habits and being on the lookout for halitosis-causing illnesses. For older people, dry mouth is fairly common and often leads to bad breath, and as we get older, our production of saliva decreases. However, when bad breath is found in children, the cause is often as simple as not having proper oral care habits -- brushing properly.

Any parent will agree, getting a child to thoroughly brush his or her teeth (or at all) can be quite challenging. As busy as parents are with life in general, often we assume that kids are brushing their teeth when they aren't. Try a brushing schedule for both parent and child where it's a group activity done twice daily. Brushing your teeth together could be fun, and then you can not only check on their little one's method and brushing technique but also serve as an example.

Invisalign vs Veneers

Image by brittanysoup via Flickr

Comfort, esthetics, and treatment time have always been the primary concerns for the adult patient when it comes to orthodontic treatment. Invisalign, when compared to other teeth straightening options, has been shown to solve many of these concerns.

Veneers have been used for a long time to address many cosmetic dental concerns. Invisalign and veneers cannot necessarily be compared directly with each other even though they address many of the same problems. Veneers are considered a “quick fix” for a whole host of dental issues including crowding, gaps between teeth, overlapping of teeth, irregular alignment, discoloration, tooth-size discrepancies, etc.

The major advantage of Invisalign is that it is virtually impossible to see while it is being worn and at the same time it is taking care of alignment and crowding problems that could be affecting the overall health of your teeth. It is not faster than getting veneers, but over a lifetime Invisalign is a much better value since it does not have to be redone over and over again. Straighter teeth means it is much easier to maintain your teeth for a lifetime – less food, plaque and debris getting stuck in those crowded, overlapped areas. Veneers are a quick fix and sometimes are an excellent option, but nearly all of Dr. Derenzy’s patients have a discussion about the benefits of having teeth straightened before any type of cosmetic smile enhancement.

Even if veneers are needed, for whatever reason, properly aligning the teeth with Invisalign can decrease the total number of veneers needed and/or improve the appearance of veneers placed by closing gaps, reducing crowding and more ideally aligning teeth. This can result in a significant cost savings. So, before you go to the dentist for veneers, see Dr. Derenzy for a free consultation to review your options for avoiding veneers or at least limiting them. Often, Dr. Derenzy can straighten your teeth with Invisalign and this will be all you would need. If veneers are still necessary to correct cosmetic defects after Invisalign, the veneer preparations on your teeth can be much more conservative, leaving more of your natural tooth behind.