I often hear from family and friends that they haven’t been to the dentist in years because nothing hurts. Oral diseases often have no pain or symptoms in their early stages so it can sneak up on a lot of patients. Early detection and prevention are the best way of stopping disease and preventing more expensive treatment down the road.

Since our mouth is part of our digestive system, it’s filled with many types of bacteria. I simplify them as “teeth bacteria” or “gum bacteria”. Gum bacteria love to hide in dark spaces, usually underneath your gums. They have a very unique feature in that they love to call their friends and form a web of colonies called biofilm. Biofilm starts off soft and whitish. In fact, if you wake up in the morning and scrape your teeth and gums you will see the white film on your nails. The only way of removing these bacterial colonies is to physically scrape them off by brushing and flossing. Here is the frustrating part, no matter how good we are at brushing and flossing, studies show that every 3-4 months these bacteria colonies get so strong they start to harden up like rocks. We call these bacterial “rock formations” calculus.