The very backbone of your dental care experience with us is the dental checkup, which provides us with the time to thoroughly find out what’s happening with your oral health. While this certainly sounds like a beneficial opportunity for patients, we find that many individuals appreciate the need for checkups but don’t know much about the details. To ensure you feel as motivated as we would hope regarding keeping up with preventive visits (and to make sure you feel informed), we would like to offer you a brief yet helpful introduction.
The Basics
When you schedule a dental checkup, you are scheduling a visit with us to examine your oral health – we generally will include this as one half of a “preventive visit,” which will also include a dental cleaning. During the checkup portion of your appointment, we will look at your oral tissues, take an up-close inspection with digital X-rays, and ask you questions about your history and recent health.
Why It’s Important
Your dental checkup is so essential because your smile and oral health are actually quite simple to maintain as long as we remain informed. However, if we do not have the chance to examine your teeth, gums, and other tissues, problems (like decay, functional disorders, infection, etc.) can begin to occur without your noticing it – and without us having the chance to detect it.
Good news! Scheduling a dental checkup like clockwork every six months will allow us to closely monitor your mouth, so we can prevent or address problems immediately rather than once they are in a progressed state. (Hint: Your checkup is also a wonderful time to ask us questions!).
