It’s the age-old saying: prevention is better than a cure.
Proactively managing your oral health is an important part of keeping your teeth strong and healthy for life. It also avoids major and costly restorative dentistry down the track! At Whitehorse Dental, we’re here to help make this easy. We offer our patients a range of preventative dentistry services in a friendly, and comfortable envfitted mouthguardironment.
Regular Maintenance Check-Ups
Our dentists wholeheartedly believe in preventative dentistry. They recommend that our patients visit us for regular dental check-ups every 6 months. This helps us track your dental health and manage any potential conditions or issues.
Given most dental conditions do not cause discomfort at first, these check-ups are important for early detection. This helps combat disease in the early stages, both protecting your teeth and limiting your expense!
Some of the things our dentists will do during your visit are:
- Look for any signs of decay, acid wear, cracks or damage from grinding your teeth at night
- Check your teeth’s gum and bone support
- Do an oral cancer screening
- Clean and polish your teeth
- Take x-rays to check the areas between your teeth that can’t be seen by visual examination
Even if you’ve had problematic teeth and gums in the past, our experienced dentists can equip you with the most efficient way of taking care of your teeth.
Fissure Sealants
Our back teeth often have deep grooves in them that accumulate food and bacteria. Whilst brushing your teeth twice daily removes some of this build-up, it does not remove it all. So, over time, decay sets in.
Fissure sealants are a tooth-coloured resin. Our dentists use them to fill the grooves, protecting your teeth against future decay. Applying fissure sealants is quick, easy and painless. It requires no anaesthetic or drilling!
At Whitehorse Dental, our dentists recommend that a good time to apply sealants is when the adult molars first start to grow in children. This occurs at about age 6 for the first molars and age 12 for the second molars.
Custom-Made Sports Mouthguards
Did you know that every year, thousands of people are treated for dental injuries that could have been prevented or minimised if they were wearing a custom-fitted mouthguard? Our dentists can create a personalised mouthguard to protect you or your child from dental injuries caused by contact to the face during sports.
Night Guards | Clenching & Grinding
Clenching and grinding your teeth during your sleep means your teeth can be rubbing against each other for hours. The amount of force we exert whilst grinding our teeth is five times that experienced whilst chewing. Our teeth are not designed to withstand that kind of pressure. Apart from damaging your teeth, grinding your teeth during the night can result in jaw pain, headaches and joint issues.
We can help you protect your teeth and avoid the associated discomforts of grinding with a made-to-fit night guard. Using a dental night guard relaxes your jaw muscles and protects your teeth from wear.
Oral Appliances for Snoring
We’re lucky enough to have specialised dentists who are trained to make custom oral appliances for the treatment of snoring and sleep apnea. Based on more than 40 years of scientific studies, The Australian Sleep Association and American Academy of Sleep Medicine back these oral appliances as a key treatment for these conditions.
Our dentists work under the recommendation of several leading sleep physicians and ENT specialists to deliver appliances that assist in the management of snoring and sleep apnoea.
