Family Dentistry

It's important for an entire family to see one dental practice because you really want to keep that continuation of care. You want to make sure that you're all ideally on the same schedule. We're kind of keeping things simple and also making sure that we're taking the best quality care of those patients.Family dentistry really includes treating everyone, so whether that's starting when your child is three and we're just getting them used to coming into the chair or sort of talking about the toothbrush and just getting them used to it. To your teenager who's in Invisalign and we need to go through that oral hygiene instruction of how to keep their teeth clean, how to keep their trays clean so that when they're done with Invisalign everything looks right. To you know the college student who might have had too much candy at school and now they've got a couple of their first cavities, we're kind of working through that.You know to the older patients who may or may not have cracked a tooth and now they need a crown, it's kind of working with all those kind of restorative options. And then obviously when we are older you know if we've lost a tooth kind of tooth replacement and things like that. Children and adults should schedule dental checkups depending on their needs.So most patients come every six months for us to keep an eye on you know any restorative needs or any of their gingival health. There are some patients depending on their needs though that need to come in more often. So there are some patients who will come in every three to four months but in general six months is recommended.Preventative care is important in all aspects of health but especially in dentistry because small cavities are much easier and honestly cheaper to take care of than larger cavities or larger problems. So if you're coming in for your six months cleaning and you're ideally having the fluoride treatment, you know we're trying to prevent those cavities from forming. But if those cavities do form then we can catch them early.It's much easier to put a small filling in versus you know waiting until you're in pain or waiting until that tooth may need a root canal or a crown in which case that's going to be much more expensive and much more time consuming. And we love to see the whole family but we do often have solutions for those childhood problems including you know helping you talk to your child about stopping using the pacifier or sucking on their thumb. You know we do place some fillings in children when they get a little bit older or if it's something that we feel like they would be better served with a pediatric dentist we do partner with pediatric dentists because ultimately we want your child to have the best experience because we don't want to create fear in those children and so sometimes we partner with a pediatric dentist to make sure that experience is the best.The most common dental issues we see in children is honestly thumb sucking so the formation of their maxillary arch can be compromised from either pacifiers or sucking on their thumbs. We do also see some you know decay issues in children as well and then a lot of times childhood trauma to teeth is also very common so especially when they're in that walking age and they tumble a lot there are often you know issues with their teeth if they've hit in their face or something along those lines. I would say that dentistry sort of changes as you age because your needs are going to be different so childhood problems can be in their pediatric teeth or their baby teeth and so we help them kind of with that transition into their permanent teeth and then when you've moved into adulthood a lot of times that's when we're talking about more cosmetic dentistry because you are now the one in charge of your own oral health for the most part and making those decisions so we're kind of there to help you whether that's you decide that your teeth are slightly crooked and we want to talk about Invisalign or your teeth don't seem to be as white as other people's teeth so we can talk about whitening you know or veneers things of that nature so we really want to kind of help keep that transition of always keeping your teeth healthy and also looking the way that you want them to look.