In life, if you are feeling a bit run down and tired and feel that you need some rejuvenation, you might decide to go to a spa for a day to pamper yourself and restore some of the vitality lost in your daily routine. This concentrated day of treatments is enough to give you back that bounce and prepare you to take on the world again. Well, it is now possible to have the same treatment for your teeth. Your teeth work hard every day, biting and chewing food and helping you to talk and drink properly, not to mention fighting off the millions of bacteria that call your oral cavity home. It’s not an easy job but your teeth do it every day.
The idea of a dental spa is similar to that of a health spa. You go to place that is calm and peaceful (unlike the traditional image of the dentists surgery) and have several treatments performed upon your teeth to restore them to full health and make them look and feel cleaner and healthier.
The main areas of treatment at the dental spa are: general, cosmetic and implant dentistry; hygiene and whitening; orthodontics and alignment; smile makeovers and state of the art; and periodontology. Other areas of treatment may be available in different spas but they will all have procedures in these areas. Your Weston-super-Mare dentist will make an assessment about which of the treatments would benefit you the most and then they will be carried out over the course of the day in a relaxing and calm environment. Dental spas are relatively new idea in dentistry but you owe it to your hardworking teeth to give them a really good service every now and then. And let’s face it, it’s also going to improve your smile and self confidence too.
Food is the fuel we need to keep our bodies working and we all have our favourites, but do we know which ones are good for our teeth. A Bath dentist has advised patients that although certain foods may be good for us, they are harmful to our teeth, on the top of the list are sugar and acid based foods and that doesn’t just mean sweets, chocolate and candy products. Literally any food that is hard to chew is not good for your teeth or gums, these foods will cause an abrasion on the gums and also at the same time scratch off the enamel that protects the surface of a tooth. Ice is a no-no and should be avoided like the plague, especially if you wear braces. Fruit is good for us and we are advised to eat five a day as apart of our diet, this will also help to keep our gums and teeth healthy through the vitamins they naturally have within them. However, fruit contains acid and it is this acid that harms our teeth. We therefore have to take counter action to avoid this rather than avoiding the fruit itself, and washing our mouths with water afterwards will go a long way to neutralising that acid. A swishing motion is needed to do this, think of it as a mouth wash, and indeed use a mouth wash after eating fruit especially citrus types and apples. Lots of so called healthy bars are also a no-no as they use sugar based chewy substances to hold the bars together. The food content may seem appealing and healthy with lots of natural seeds and nuts, but take a look at the labels to see what else they contain. It isn’t just a case of certain foods being good for our bodies; we need to be careful what they contain as our mouths are also part of our body.
Dr Gerrard is a Bristol based Cosmetic dentist with many years of experience and is one of only a small number of dentists accredited by The British Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry