Gum disease is prevalent, all of society, and most of it goes undiagnosed, but when our patients come in, we do a thorough exam, and we check everything. We check the soft tissue. We check the teeth. We do all that. But gum disease is silent, and what it’s doing … this is the best way I can describe it. There is build-up on your teeth. Sometimes you hear it called tartar. Sometimes there’s tartar-control toothpaste and things like that. But it’s calculus, but it’s build-up on your teeth, and it’s actually a calcium salt that forms on the teeth.

The best way I can describe is like mortar between bricks, and so it’s porous, and the bacteria live in these little brick houses, if you will. And so, we have techniques and therapies that we can do to get those bacteria out of there, because if not, what happens is the body starts to respond by losing the bone and the tissue to fight off this infection that’s never going to go away because we’ve built a brick house for it to live in.

If we detect that, we let our patients know. When we schedule them to do very specific cleanings to remove that build-up, and Amber and Cheryl are both highly trained, very, very good at this. Then we start letting them go down the healing process. Once they lose bone, unless we do bone grafts, that we can never regrow that bone, but we can stop it. So gum disease can be controlled, but once you have that, you have to just stay on top of it and maintain yourself to keep those build-ups off your teeth, and that keeps the bacteria in your mouth down, and it just leads you to having a healthy mouth.