Say NO To Crack!

OK, Picture this. It's a hot and sweltering summer day. You have been working in the yard all afternoon and you are sweating and your lovely wife brings you a tall refreshing ice cold glass of tea, you toss down your rake and grab the glass and just as you start to take a drink, cold hits a tooth and instead of your thirst being quenched you feel like an ice pick is being stabbed into your tooth. Or maybe you are sitting down to watch a movie and you have a cup of milk and a plate of cookies and just as you get into a drama filled moment and take a bite of a cookie some of that sugar hits one tooth and suddenly you feel a sharp shooting pain that last longer than a Hollywood marriage. These are signs that a tooth may have a crack. A crack in a tooth is usually microscopic but to the germs in your mouth is may as well be the Grand Canyon and they take the opportunity to zip into the crack and wreak havoc. This commonly happens in teeth that have metal fillings. The metal expands and contracts with hot and cold (coffee and ice cream anyone?) Soon enough it doesn't have any room to expand anymore and it cracks! But if the cracks are microscopic and you can't see them with the naked eye, and even if you have an x-ray taken you can't see any sign of damage until the damage is quite large how do you know it's there? I have heard dentists say that cracked teeth is one of the most difficult problems to diagnose. They may just listen to your symptoms and then try to duplicate the pain you are describing (yikes!) yet Dr. Parkin doesn't seem to have any trouble finding these cracks. What is the difference between these dentists and Dr. Parkin. It is not that he eats lots of carrots and has perfect eyesight, it is because he uses an Intra-oral Camera.


The intra-oral camera has several benefits; it allows you as the patient to actually see what is happening in your own mouth and it allows Dr. Parkin to see a tooth magnified 30 times the actual size. That should help with seeing cracks, don't you think?





So, if you have a crack in a tooth what are the options for fixing it. If you catch it early enough you can have the old filling removed, the decay that is underneath removed and replace it with a composite (tooth colored) filling. Dr. Parkin doesn't use any metal fillings and hasn't since "When Doves Cry" was the number one song in the nation *1984* If you wait a bit longer, then the old filling and decay can be removed but the tooth may need a crown, and if you wait and wait and wait you can still have it fixed (although not cheaply) because small cavities turn into big cavities and eventually turn into root canals and then also need crowns. So, like most things, find the problem early and take care of it quickly!





Now, I know you are dying to see some cracked teeth--so at the top of the page there are some "before" pictures of teeth that we have fixed in our office. See if you can spot the cracks in them!

don't like getting headaches? me neither!

Good morning all my lovely blog readers. It has been a while since I have talked to you. I hope you all had a fun Labor Day weekend. Did you BBQ? Go out to the lake? Have some family visit? Ah….family visits. Does the simple thought of having relatives stay over for a 3 day weekend make your teeth clench? Well that is what we will be talking about today. Teeth clenching that is…not family visits.
Teeth clenching is often a habit you may have and not even know. It is especially common at night. So how do you know if you have this habit if you aren’t even aware of it? Well, do you ever wake up in the morning with a headache? Do you have a stiff or aching jaw, a sore neck, or sensitive teeth? If you said yes then you just may be clenching your teeth. The general rule is lips together teeth apart, if you find yourself with your teeth together during the day…catch yourself and quit doing it! But if you are doing it while you are sleeping, then how are you supposed to break that habit?
Well, the answer is an NTI. Technically, that means nocieptive trigeminal inhibition tension suppression system-but enough of that dental mumbo jumbo. What is an NTI in real words!

An NTI is a mouth guard of sorts. You wear it at night. It is a small piece about 1 inch in length and 2 centimeters in width that fits over your two front teeth. It is then fitted to YOUR teeth (so not the same as generic mouth guard you would buy at Wal-Mart) and it snaps into place nice and tight so you can’t remove it with your tongue or lips at night and choke on it (I was worried about that!) so once you have it in and you bite down your back teeth cannot touch. You just wear it at night and since those back teeth can now not touch, you can’t work those muscles that cause migraines, sore jaws, and sore necks. I have included 2 pictures at the bottom of the post. One without my NTI and one with my NTI so you can get a better picture of how and where it fits. I have been wearing my NTI for about a year now, (and since I was taught “never say never”) I will say that I very rarely get headaches anymore, when “pre-NTI” I would wake up with headaches 2-3 times a week. Not waking up with headaches that last all day makes me a very happy girl and keeps my co-workers very happy also!
If you would like more information on this wonderful device that I won’t sleep without anymore you can visit www.headacheprevention.com or you can call me at the office and we can talk some more about it.

love, your friendly dental assistant, Denise