Gum Disease Might Lead to Painful Treatments. Avoid Losing Your Teeth!
It was tough to hear, the doctor said that I needed a ’scaling and root planing’ procedure performed. I was told that I should not worry about the pain because they would make my gums numb. That made me wonder what I would feel when the numbness wore off. I was asked if I was ready to start now.
Absolutely not! I didn’t want this procedure done and I wasn’t about to start today. I wanted to understand what was going on. I wanted to know why I had to have this done all of the sudden. Six months ago, I seemed to be fine.
When I had time to quiet my thoughts a bit, I wondered about the situation. Had my doctor been focused on prevention? If she had been, wouldn’t she have told me what I could do to avoid the SRP treatment?
It made me sad to think that I had a problem with gum disease. Gum disease even sounds like a funny name. But, I wasn’t laughing at that point. I was kind of fearful about this SRP treatment. Most people are probably like me, they don’t even know they have this problem until a dentists tells them. At that point, they might also wonder why the dentist didn’t tell them much about preventing it in the first place.
My personal research helped me to realize that this didn’t happen between office visits. It was a problem that had been brewing for years. Only when things were really out of control did the dentist and hygienist tell me about it - and what they could offer as a treatment.
In retrospect, I’m very happy that I declined that scaling and root planing treatment. It forced me to go out and find some answers on my own. What I discovered was a bit disturbing.
So many people have gum disease right now. The high numbers hardly seem natural. It’s actually incredible. It makes you wonder why no one has really championed this cause in a big way - especially in the area of prevention.
Virtually any dentists or hygienist will verify for you that perhaps as much as 80% of the population has a problem with gum disease. You would have to conclude that either the statistics are skewed or a whole bunch of those people have no idea they have gum disease.
In either case, people are not likely to seek help or do their personal research until things get bad. That is a shame because an ‘ounce of prevention…” There are several tools and products that I found to be very helpful. I wish that I had known about these items years ago. But it seems the only thing the dentist told me about was brushing, flossing and a popular mouthwash.
Brushing and flossing alone just did not work for me. I had always taken good care of my teeth and I brushed and flossed regularly. Had they been enough, I wouldn’t have ended up with gum disease.
I really did find some fantastic answers to my problem. In the end, my hygienist and the dentist she worked for were almost shocked when they saw me next. They both agreed that I did not need that SRP treatment - the one they said was the only thing that could help me just a few months before. You can check out the link below to find out some of what I did to get better!
It would be great if more people could learn about gingivitis and periodontal disease. It would be even better if they learned about prevention and the details before they start to see a problem in their own mouths. Barring any major injury or trauma, we should not, if we take care, have to lose teeth to gum disease.