Assess your patients' gum health in your office using this tool and send them home with a personalized report.
A considerable amount of time, effort and money goes into complex restorative work including crowns or bridges. Patients, often after past caries experience, and other risk-related behaviors such as poor oral hygiene or a sugary diet, end up needing a substantial amount of dental work to stabilize their oral health. While many of the risk factors which have caused the dental disease will have been addressed prior to commencing complex restorative work, the work doesn't end there.
Especially for older patients, maintaining this complex restorative work can be challenging. Difficulties include home care and sub-gingival restorative margins, the risk of root caries associated with exposed roots caused by gingival recession and, for some patients, reduced manual dexterity that negatively impacts their ability to deliver pristine oral hygiene. They also may have never known how best to care for their teeth in the first place! These can all lead to the dreaded secondary caries which can be difficult to treat and ultimately end in tooth-loss. This is clearly not an outcome that is desired, and your patient has already invested a lot of time and money to improve their oral health.
So how can we help these patients to protect their complex work? The following are suggested and recommended by leading dental authorities:
Ensuring the long term success of complex dental work and protecting the patient's investment will help to avoid having dissatisfied patients and improve their oral health for the future.
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