Gum Treatment
Gum treatment is important part of oral health as the gums and the underlying supporting bone structure provides the foundation of your teeth. Our Periodontist, or gum specialist offers specialized gum treatment.
What is gum diseases ?
How do I know that I have gum disease?
How to treat gum diseases?
Who needs gum treatment?
Who do I see for gum treatment ?
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Progression of gum diseases
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What is gum diseases ?
In people with healthy gums , the gums and bone are firmly attached to the teeth. When you have gum disease, the gum and bony support begins to strip away from the tooth . As the gum disease progressess, with loss of gum and bone , the tooth begins to loosen and gum infection or gum boil becomes more and more frequent. Finally the tooth will drop out from the mouth due to lack of bony support.
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How do I know I have gum diseases ?
One of the earliest symptoms of gum diseases, is bleeding gums. Bleeding gums indicates that there is some inflammation or infection of the gums. In a person with healthy gums, even with vigorous brushing or flossing, there will be no bleeding . The person on the left has gum disease, as her gums are red and swollen around her upper incisors . Her gums also bleeds easily on brushing.
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How do healthy gums look like?
Healthy gums are pink, flat,knife edge and stippled like orange
How your gums affect your smile?
Just as a picture needs a frame, a tooth needs support of good healthy gums. Beautiful teeth can be marred by unsightly gums that are red, swollen, and puffy. Worse, when the gum diseases progresses, there will be gum recession. As the result, the teeth will look longer with black holes between teeth due to lost of gums and supporting jaw bone.
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How to treat gum diseases ?
The essential goal of gum treatment is to keep bacterial plaque a teeth to zero.
With no bacteria , there will be no gum disease.
What are the treatment procedures for gum diseases.?
The gum treatment procedures are
1) Scaling an polishing
2) Root planning
3) Gum surgery
4) Bone grafting and dental implants
Scaling and polishing
In this process, the dentist use an ultrasonic device to remove, plaque and tarter from the teeth. Modern, ultrasonic devices, made scaling more comfortable and painless
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Root planning.
Root planning or deep cleaning is done when the tarter or calculus is deeply embedded in the roots due to loosening of gum and bone lost. The gums are numbed with local anaesthetics and the roots are plane carefully with fine root planning instruments. The goal of this conservative treatment is to keep the teeth completely free of tarter and bacterial plaque.
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Gum ( Periodontal ) Surgery
When the separation of gums from the teeth is severe with deep pockets, gum surgery is required. In such cases, root planning is difficult as the pockets is too deep to enable complete removal of tarter and plaque.
When the gum is numb, the gums are push aside to enable complete access for complete cleaning. Sometimes the excess gums are remove so as to get of the deep pockets. In other instances, gum and bone regeneration done through a process called Guided Tissue Regeneration. ( GTR )
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Gum diseases and dental implants
In cases ,where the gum disease is so advance that it cannot be saved by conventional gum treatment procedure, the tooth should be extracted as soon as possible . By early extraction of hopelessly infected tooth , further bone lost is prevented . With early extraction of teeth with gum diseases, we preserve as much jaw bone as possible so that a dental implant can be done at a later stage.
The xray on the left shows 2 lower incisors with advance gum diseases. As the teeth cannot be saved through gum treatment , early removal of teeth and
bone grafting will enable dental implants to be done a few months later.
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With removable of the badly infected incisors , the e healing process of the jaw bone will begin. With modern bone grafting techniques , placement of dental implants is now possible. If early extraction of hopeless teeth is not done, the presence of constant gum infection will result in more bone lost and as a result bone grafting and dental implants placement will be impossible.
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