Preventative Care

Preventative dentistry at Hello Dental

Prevention forms the bedrock around everything we do at Hello Dental Colchester.

​In common with other aspects of our health, the old adage “prevention is better than cure” applies to your teeth and gums also.

Tooth decay and gum disease are preventable diseases in most people.

Some people have a natural genetic predisposition to getting decay and gum disease. For these people, it is even more important to have a comprehensive realistic preventative strategy that is customised to their lifestyle to minimise and hopefully avoid most dental diseases.

Prevention has evolved

There has been a quiet evolution in our understanding of dental disease and much research has been concentrated on new materials, techniques and systems to try to eradicate tooth decay and gum disease.

We have a long way to go to reach this aim but recent innovations have made it possible to reverse early decay and strengthen teeth to increase their resistance to tooth decay. At Hello Dental Colchester we have embraced many of these innovations and tailored the strategies to your needs and your particular risk factors. While good old fluoride toothpaste still plays a very important part in the overall strategy, other types of materials and minerals have been developed to help boost and strengthen our enamel and help protect our teeth from the damaging effects of acids and bacteria.

Examples of some of these innovations are amorphous calcium phosphate and nano-hydroxyapatite, both of which have been shown to help strengthen enamel and reduce tooth sensitivity. Much work is being done on improving the delivery systems for these new minerals which harness our tooth’s own natural ability to heal itself. Just in the last couple of years’, toothpaste that have these new minerals in them have been launched and while the evidence base and research for these are not as robust we know, at least at a molecular level, these materials do have the ability to reverse decay.

Together with these, new systems for treating high decay risk and disinfecting the mouth have been created. One of these leading systems is Cari-free which has a good strong research base showing many positive benefits from reducing decay-causing bacteria to re-mineralising and strengthening teeth. Cari-free uses various different technologies delivered via mouthwashes, fresh breath sprays and chewing gum to make it easy to integrate into most people’s lifestyles.

The Hello Dental Colchester prevention difference

We take a slightly different approach to help our patients avoid tooth decay and gum disease.

We prefer not to do the old-fashioned “telling off” that so many people have experienced. Apart from not being very nice, we know it just does not work for most people, and even less for anxious patients and those scared of the dentist. We try very hard not to judge and cause our patients embarrassment.

Our three-step approach to creating dental prevention programs that work

1.  Seek first to understand

To effectively change behaviours, we know it must be practical for the changes to fit into your lifestyle. Simply bombarding you with what you should be doing may make some difference in the short-term but rarely effects lasting change.

So we listen to you and ask you questions about your lifestyle so we can better understand where the risk factors lie and can get a picture of what will be feasible to incorporate quickly, and without too much upheaval into your lifestyle.

2.  Identify risk factors 

As dentists we are primarily trained as surgeons, we see broken teeth, bleeding gums, abscesses and we want to fix it!

At Hello Dental Colchester we have taken a different approach and have moved our focus to identifying your risk factors for various diseases so we can address these with the latest preventative strategies that are appropriate for you as an individual.

Of course it’s important to fix what is broken, but we know that if we get the prevention right, not only will all our “fixing” last longer, it will also mean there will be less to fix – a win-win for us and our patients!

3.  Address the risk factors

Once we understand your lifestyle and particular risk factors we will then look at the particular preventative solutions we need to focus on for you and, more importantly, the most effective ways to help you integrate these into your daily routine.

This is not a one-off process, we constantly evaluate your feedback and change tact and approach to ensure we are slowly but surely making progress.

Integrating change into your lifestyle can take a little while and so we see our role as support workers to encourage you and customise the right tools and techniques to make it easy for you to make the changes.