Video: Taking Care of Teeth With Braces

Taking care of teeth with braces requires paying special attention to hygiene, as brushing and flossing teeth becomes much more difficult when braces are in the way. Discuss hygiene in detail when getting braces, or consider getting Invisalign removable braces, with advice from a general dentist in this free video on dentistry and braces.

Video Transcript

Having braces obviously presents it's problems in terms of hygiene. Typically we find that patients that wear braces have compromised hygiene. It is much more difficult to keep the teeth clean, furthermore keep the gums healthy. It's for this reason that we spend a dramatic amount of time explaining that when you have braces that you have to really work on the oral hygiene. The things, the basics such as brushing and flossing, as well as using a regular mouth rinse. It can do several things, one it can obviously keep the teeth clean so that they stay white while you're in braces. Secondly it keeps them clean so that we don't get any debris around the gums to cause the gums to get inflamed, which we call gingivitis. Thirdly, it also prevents us from developing cavities around the areas that we can't normally get to. We know that when we have brackets and wires wrapped around the teeth it is much more difficult to get into those areas that you normally could. And we find that those harder to reach areas are the areas that we typically find your more susceptible to getting cavities. Therefore, hygiene becomes extremely important. The brushing, you know all around the teeth , as well as you know using special floss to get around the teeth. Now obviously when there's a wire that wraps around the teeth you can't drop your floss down in between the teeth normally because the wire kind of restricts you from doing that, but there is special flossing aids that you can purchase at any local pharmacy called floss threaders to kind of help navigate around the braces. And again, you know the hygiene becomes really, really important just because it's so much harder to keep everything clean that we find that patients have a lot more difficulty with gingivitis as well as cavities and things like that. That's one advantage to the Invisalign braces is because they're clear braces and they are removable you can take them in and out at your leisure when you do your hygiene. Makes that much more healthy on the tissue and also allows us to keep everything clean in an appropriate manner so that we do not develop any problems such as gingivitis and cavities.

Taking Care of Teeth With Braces

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