Archive for the ‘Common Concerns’ Category

Dental Crown Question

Friday, October 30th, 2009

The crowns have never felt right. What’s the matter?

A large part of the Calcium Therapy approach includes the bite, that is, how the teeth fit together, or occusal interdigitation. We always check out the bite when crowns or fillings are placed and when there is a bite problem, gum recession, or sensitivity trouble. Invaribly we have to equilibrate the bite, adjust the dental fillings and crowns, etc. to fit the natural bite. Every patient has their own specific bite and we must learn to deal with that bite when it walks in the door.

Changing that bite to the likes of me, the dentist, or for the TV camera is not a very clever idea. A traumatic, manufactured bite is easily the cause of hyersensitivity and disfunction of the teeth, TMJ pain, bone or tooth loss, etc…and periodontal disease. We check out the bite and correct it so that the patient is biting on their own teeth as much as possible and secondarily on the dental work. In other words, “Get the dental work out of the way.” The more dental work one has the more the bite is manufactured and harder to make work for the patient.

The “old-fashed dentists” taught us to design into the natural bite. Their “functional and cosmetic” dentistry was superb, hidden so well, no one would dream the patient had any dental restorations. Ask George Washington, or John Kennedy, or my last patient, Angie. She had a lot of dentistry by a great dentist, before we ever saw her. We did not have to touch it. She does not have to fit the dental work. It fits the her as if was not even there. That’s our goal  too when placing crowns and fillings, or correcting the bite.This can be done easily with no anesthesia and no damage to the crown.


Are Deep Cleanings Needed?

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Carol writes, “Are deep cleanings of her teeth needed?

Yes, deep cleanings with scaling are needed at times; however, they are expensive and painful. When done with anesthesia it amounts to gum surgery, and that is not very nice for anyone. CTI has not needed to do gum surgeries for over 45 years, even for the most hopeless cases of gum infection. Ordinary cleanings should be needed only a couple times a year and take little time. Once the Calcium Therapy is used to address the causes of the gum problems, these cleanings in our office take less than ten minutes.

NO ONE NEEDS GUM SURGERY.

PLAQUE can be cleaned off with a toothbrush because it is soft, irritable material left around the necks of the teeth. Digging around the gums looking for something to scrape or scale off the teeth isn’t necessary.  An experienced dentist can determine if there is anything in the pockets without all the probing into gum pockets.

MEASURING POCKETS, (BOP, bleeding on probing) as most people have suffered through, is also needless nonsense, and tells the dentist almost nothing biological.

IN DENTISTRY EXPERIENCE COUNTS.

Back in the 1970s a dentist lecturing at the Chicago Dental Meeting, the best in the USA at that time, said, “Gum pocket measuring spreads infection all over the mouth.

He was booed, yelled at, and some dentists walked out. Well, “Dr. Way-Ahead-of-His-Time” was spot on. It does spread infection all over the mouth and cause constant, on-going problems. The patient never gets over the infection. Biological activity is our best expression of the biological infection, not linear measuring with a periodontal probe. Spreading the infection is the fast track to loss of your teeth.

The Calcium Therapy and Materials help determine the biological activity of gum pockets, and rapidly heals periodontal infections, strengthens the bone and teeth, reduces bleeding, even remineralizes teeth to make them more resistant to plaque and calculus formation.

There is no pain with the Calcium Therapy, no numbness, no planing or dillydallying around. The teeth are cleaned easily and rapidly. The calcium materials are applied before, during, or after the cleaning, and makes the whole process work for the comfort of the patient. There are no miserable aftershocks with Calcium Therapy.

The Calcium Therapy has been working on patients now for 47 years and is based on other nonsurgical methods that did have materials the were too harsh – like zinc chloride dressings. That was the good Dr. Donahue’s approach out of the 1940s. It worked but was too harsh for our approach. However, Dr. Donahue was a dental pioneer who deserves far more credit than we ever gave him.

Periodontal surgeries come out of the 1970s, long after nonsurgical treatments and our Calcium Therapies in the Root Canal and Periodontal fields. What is sold as the oldest and wisest surgical approaches are not so old or wise as non surgical approaches. Some dentists get lost in what we learned in school, and then, have to struggle to grow out of it. We all have to face that, especially when decades of experience do not match everything we learned in school.

CALCIUM THERAPIES SOLVE GUM DISEASE.