The Best Ways to Care for Your Dental Implants
At Iqaluit Dental Clinic, we believe that dental implants can really make you confident about your smile. However, you need to take good care of them and maintain them in good condition to reap all the benefits and make them last for as long as possible. Let’s check out the best ways to care for your dental implants.
The Details
1. Brush twice every day with the right technique – With dental implants, you need to brush your teeth regularly, at least twice to maintain them in good condition. Don’t treat them as foreign objects in your jaw. Treat them as if they are your real teeth and give them the same care. Use a soft-bristled nylon brush to clean your teeth regularly. Soft-bristles nylon brushes are gentle and pliable and clean your gums and implants without hurting them. Avoid hard-bristled toothbrushes that may scratch your implants.
The brushing technique is also very important for cleaning your teeth and maintaining implants in pristine condition. You need to do gradual and gentle circular motions on your teeth with the toothbrush. Make sure that you thoroughly clean the front, the back, and the upper surfaces of your teeth along with the edges that are connected to the gum. If you have difficulty maintaining that kind of discipline while brushing every time, you may get an electric toothbrush.
Electric toothbrushes can oscillate the bristles very fast and perform tens of thousands of micro brushes in a second. They are also effortless and can help your dental hygiene dramatically by making the brushing process more seamless.
2. Don’t use abrasive products – Don’t use abrasive toothpaste and mouthwashes. Those products leave microscopic damage to the natural enamel of your teeth. The same holds for the implants. As you keep using abrasive products, the microscopic damage stacks up and makes the crown weaker and more brittle. You’ll eventually experience cracks and chipping on your real teeth as well as the implants.
For instance, toothbrushes that remove stains or whiten your teeth are more abrasive and damage the enamel. While the UK doesn’t have an official abrasion rating for toothpaste sold in the country, you can always rely on Relative Dentin Abrasivity (RDA) adopted by the American Dental Association across the pond. You can search for a toothpaste’s RDA rating on the internet before you buy it.
The lower the rating, the better. Buy toothpaste with an RDA rating between 0 – 70 since they are low abrasive. Similarly, try to avoid mouthwashes and oral hygiene products that have an intense flavour. Flavours like cinnamon and mint can cause an uncomfortable feeling in your mouth and bring down your dental hygiene discipline.
3. Floss regularly – According to studies, just around 30 per cent of people in the UK floss daily. That means two-thirds of the population aren’t flossing enough. If you belong to the latter group, you need to change things right now, especially if you have dental implants. Flossing is more important for people with dental implants since plaque can easily accumulate around your implants and deteriorate your overall oral hygiene.
Regular flossing tools like nylon or metal wires are not good for dental implants either. They shouldn’t be used either way since they can easily damage your gums and teeth if you don’t use the proper flossing technique. That’s why you should switch to unwaxed tapes or implant-specific floss. To floss your implants, loop the floss around your implant and make sure the floss is sticking out on both sides of the crown. Now use a gentle shoeshine movement to crisscross the floss in the front and the back.
You may also complement regular flossing with specialized tools like a water flosser. This nifty tool can drastically reduce bleeding and inflammation and also reach the most inaccessible spots between your teeth. However, it’s not a substitute for traditional flossing. To take your flossing game to another level, you may carry floss on you at all times, so that you can quickly floss your teeth in the washroom after a quick lunch.
4. Avoid hard and sticky food – Hard and sticky food can easily damage your implants along with any opposing teeth. The list for that kind of food is very long and seems like it’s increasing every day. Some of them include hard candies, dried fruit, potato chips, raw carrots, rare steak, hard and crusty bread, and ice cream. You also need to axe any damaging habits that stress your teeth, gums, and implants.
Be conscious of what you put in your mouth and control your chewing habits. Don’t bite into ice or chew pencils. If you have a habit of grinding your teeth in sleep, put on your night guard before hitting the bed. Minimizing or getting rid of alcohol and smoking is also a good idea, especially if it hasn’t been long since you got your implants. Dental implants take around six months to heal and drinking or smoking during this period would slow down that process.
5. Schedule regular visits to the dentist – Maintaining good oral hygiene is the best way to care for your implants and that’s incomplete without regular visits to the dentist. Make sure that you visit the dentist at least twice a year to get your oral health and the condition of your dental implants checked.
That way your dentist would be able to keep a keen eye on the density of the teeth, gum tissue health and other such factors and fix problems at the first signs of symptoms. With regular visits to dentists and proper oral hygiene, your dental implants can easily last you for over a decade. The initial pain after getting your implants would seem like a distant dream when you take care of them.
Conclusion
At Iqaluit Dental Clinic, we suggest that you use the above-mentioned tips to take care of your dental implants and maintain them in the best possible condition. Implants are expensive and taking good care of them helps you to get more mileage and preserve your beautiful smile.