Monster Cookies

We go to Discover Dental in the Castleridge shopping centre. I love the staff and the office there for myself and the kids. They seem to be preying on Jon though!

Nope we have never had that. Thank goodness.

That sucks..

Luckily, our dentist right now doesn’t do that. He’s actually the same age as Mike and they knew eachother from school, so I don’t think he would try that on us anyways, but even the older dentist that he bought the practice off of never did that to us.
Sorry, you’ve got a pushy dentist.

Yep, mine tries to upsell me every time, drives me crazy! Not stuff like “changes in the composition” but says I need bonding on the front teeth to build them up, braces, an implant for the tooth that is missing… I’m with Jon, clean my teeth, fill what NEEDS filling and leave me alone! Oh, and mine will not direct bill my insurance, I have to pay ahead and wait for the insurance to come back (my coworkers all get direct billing). Keeghan’s pediatric dentist was incredible though

I just want to say I work for a dentist and it is important to remember that those upsale suggestions are merely recommendations. Unfortunately, a dentist also has a business to run. You can look into your local dental society to see if your dentist has good credibility in the community. Also, I’d like to add that getting your teeth cleaned once a year is not enough. 6 months is the standard recommendation due to the amount of build up people have based on their sub-par efforts of oral hygiene. Most adults actually require cleaning every 3-4 months, particularly those that don’t floss efficiently, regularly. Dentists always get a bad rap, and while I’ll agree that there’s a lot of quacks out there who’ve earned it, plenty of dentists are legit and have a specific standard of care they adhere to, thus causing them to inform their patients of all of their options, both cosmetic and necessary.

I appreciate getting a glimpse of what the dentally unifnormed public thinks about dentistry.

I urge you to look up periodontal disease to understand the necessity for more than one cleaning a year. I am not sure if your dentist mentioned gum deisease to you or not, but it is the reason people lose their teeth. Also, research has shown that the plaque present in the oral cavity is the same plaque that is found in the arteries of heart disease patients. Another interesting fact: pregnant mothers with gum disease tend to have babies of lower birth weight and in some cases just as unhealthy as mothers who smoke while pregnant.

Unfortunately, lot of old school dentists just watch gum disease progress until it gets severe and requires a specialist and usually surgery.
Dentally speaking, there are 4 types of people in this world:
1. Those that get gum disease
2. Those that get tooth decay
3. Those that get both
4. Those that get neither
Congrats to you if you were able to not see a dentist for 9 years and not have any gum issues. You are in the top .01% of the population. If we could bottle your immunities and sell them we’d be millionaires!
There are many factors that determine which of the 4 people you are. Mainly it boils down to whether or not your body produces the specific antibodies that fight off the specific bacteria that cause either tooth decay or gum disease. If your gums bleed even the slightest bit during brushing or flossing, you have gum disease. If you touched anywhere else on your body and it bled it’d be alarming, right?

The earliest stage of gum disease is gingivitis, which everyone hears about on tv in toothpaste ads. Gingivitis is the bleeding of the gums, just inflammation. Once there is bone loss that creates pockets of 4mm or more and bleeding is present, that is periodontal disease.
Most people don’t have a resistance to gum diesease. After plaque (which produces every 12-24 hours) is on the teeth for 24 hours it begins to calcify and turns into calculus (tartar). This is a hard deposit that forms a coral reef for bacteria to breed in and under. Once a shelter of calculus is formed, the bacteria move in and set up New York City under your gums. This causes the bone that holds your teeth in place to resorb, causing pockets that ultimately lead to mobility and loss of the teeth. If people don’t floss *efficiently* daily, they have a great potential to develop gum disease.

Perio disease does not get better on its own. Ever. Not even with diligent home care. You can’t clean 4mm below your gums on your own. When you get your teeth cleaned, they should also be meausring your pocket depths (this is here they probe around and call out numbers like 323, 323, 434) . 1-3mm is a healthy reading. Any sites of bleeding or tenderness are an indication of inflammation.

I’m sorry to have gotten so long winded about this, but I know there is a misconception because the general public isn’t informed of these things. I make my hourly wage whether you show up 2 or 6 times a year, so I have no incentive to urge you to go for more frequent cleanings. As a dental professional I feel obligated to educate.
If you have any questions let me know.

I apologize if I have offended you in some way with my post. I was just commenting on the upsell that my husband was subjected to. If I had gone to a cellular phone store and been “upsold” as much, I would have posted the same (about phones though, not teeth, obviously).

I don’t understand really how this turned into a discussion about periodontal disease, but I guess I’m one of the lucky ones who has 9.5 lb full-term babies even though my gums might bleed a little when I floss too vigorously.

What I am not “lucky” enough to have is enough money to have my teeth cleaned more than once per year, so the guilt trip that my poor dental hygiene is going to be my demise isn’t going to make me do it more. So be it.

I think you may count me less educated than I really am, which I guess is the unfortunate part of people who don’t know me personally having the ability to read my blog.

What I’m starting to consider is that you are perhaps from my dentist’s office and are trying to upsell me to more cleanings per year. In which case, I would most definitely need to switch to a new dentist because now I’d be sure that you are “out to get me”.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion and the dental health refresher. I hope to see more comments from you in the future.

I understand that dentistry is not cheap. Nor is brain surgery. (why would you ever skimp on either?) My point was that the most important factor in determining your specific dental treatment should be health, first and foremost, not insurance or finances. My explanation was only to make that decision easier.

My only goal was to let you know why its necessary to go more frequently. I didn’t intend to give you a guilt trip or make you think your lack of dental health would be your demise. I just wanted to make sure that when you’re making your list of reasons not to get your teeth cleaned more often, you can leave out “because its unnecessary”. It is absolutely necessary whether its affordable or not. The ADA makes the recommendations based on health research, not demographics and income levels (be it of the patient or dentist).
I printed out this thread and presented it in our weekly staff meeting today. Its an eye opener to dental professionals to see what misconceptions the general public has about dentistry. Believe it or not, dental school doesn’t have a course on “how to hose over your patients and take them for all they’ve got”.
It’s unfortunate that people are quicker to assume they’re being taken than they are to trust a professional. Well, what would a dentist know about dentistry anyway?