White Wolf Dental Group

MYTH: If you have a toothache you should put an aspirin on the tooth to relieve the pain.

FACT: YIKES! If you have a headache, you don’t put the aspirin on your head, if you have a knee problem, you don’t put it on your knee. Aspirin (and most pain relievers) work by being absorbed in the stomach and working internally.

But it’s worse than that—aspirin is an ACID—letting an acid sit on your tissue will cause a nasty chemical burn.

MYTH: Heart attacks can be linked to periodontal disease.

FACT: TRUE! Studies show that 85% of patients who suffer from heart attacks do have periodontal disease. Periodontal disease is the name for bacterial infections of the gums in the mouth. There are treatment options for periodontal disease based on the severity of the infections. Signs of periodontal disease include: bleeding gums, red/swollen gums, receding gums, loose teeth and etc.

MYTH: You lose a tooth for every child (a Mom will sometimes say)

FACT: Well, it’s true that many women will find that their dental problems begin around the time they start having kids. Some have indeed lost “a tooth for every child.”

So is that the cost of childbearing? Well, there are lots of problems that begin with the arrival of your kids (place your own list here), but there is no DIRECT cause and effect between babies showing up and teeth leaving.

Now my own, non scientific impression, is that the two are linked together for two reasons.

First – when you have a baby, your own life takes a nonreversible turn for the worse – you stop sleeping, you stop eating right, you can’t exercise anymore, etc. I figure you’re not spending as much time flossing when you are walking the floors every night at 2:00, 3:30 and 4:45. This makes your decay rate go up.

The second is age. Fluoride has given kids lots of protection from decay problems that used to start early in childhood. People tend to get problems anyway, but later, and to a lesser degree. That later now comes in people’s 20’s say, when women are beginning to have kids, instead of age 6.

This is based on no study, just my theories, but kids do not “take the calcium out of teeth” (see below).

MYTH: Babies take calcium out of their mothers teeth

FACT: This is closer to the truth than the first myth, since the calcium in bone is constantly being added and subtracted. When it is needed for the Moms' blood levels or the babies development, it will be subtracted from her bones.

Teeth are different. The enamel, the hard coating you see when you look at teeth, is not at all available as a reservoir of calcium. There are no cells to dissolve it to release the calcium. The inside of the tooth could potentially be dissolved (or technically “resorbed”) but this is an unusual occurrence and only happens if there has been trauma to the tooth or a few other rare conditions. Even if it did occur, it would be on the inside of the tooth, or outside under the gum and you wouldn’t know about it by looking (but we would if we read your X-rays)

MYTH: You should soak your dentures in bleach to clean them

FACT: This sure does a good job killing the germs, but bleach is a dangerous thing to be sloshing around the bathroom every day (especially if you forget to rinse the dentures before putting them in).

It also bleaches the dentures. Not the teeth (which you might like), because they are made from a really dense plastic, but the pink fibered, natural looking denture base. It starts to look like the wax in “wax lip” (if you don’t know what those are – they were a disgusting treat sold at newsstands that looked like lips, but were filled with a sugary liquid-ask your Dad he used to get them).

MYTH: You should rinse your mouth with salt water after a tooth extraction

FACT: A dentist I used to work for when I was just out of school used to yell at his patients who asked if they should rinse with salt water. “Salt is for chicken soup!” he’d say.

A literature search showed a few studies that looked at it’s effectiveness compared to antibacterial mouth rinses in preventing post extraction problems, and found salt water was no better (but no worse) than them.

So, if salt makes the water more palatable when you are rinsing after some dental treatment, go ahead and do it. But don’t rinse with chicken soup.

MYTH: I’ve heard that root canals (or implants, crowns, gum treatments, etc) don’t work. My friend had a root canal (or implant, crown, gum treatment, etc.) and it didn’t work.

FACT: Of course there are failures with all types of treatment. Heck, your own tooth failed or we wouldn’t be talking about these other therapies. And how could we expect anything manmade to be better than a tooth? Almost every day I see implants that are 10-15 years old and crowns and root canals that are 20-30 years old (‘cause we’ve been doing them longer) still working. That’s pretty good! How long did the surgeon tell your friend the artificial hip would last?

It’s my job to know which situations predict a high likelihood of success for that treatment mode, and when it’s best to look at another. Even more important is to look at your risk factors – why did you lose the tooth and what does that say about how we replace it.

Do you have a very high decay rate? We might lean more toward an implant which will never decay rather than a root canal and crown on a weakened decayed out tooth.

Are you a smoker with resorbed weak bone? In that case, maybe a bridge would be better than an implant.

I think it is vitally important for my patients to understand, not only their options, but what the risks are for future problems, how they can improve their odds, and what might be done if there are problems down the road.

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