summerville sc – Summerville Pediatric Dentistry

IT’S A NEW YEAR!

IT’S A NEW YEAR! We’re so excited for what this year will bring, particularly when we look back at everything we achieved in 2018. That’s why we’re taking this opportunity to give our wonderful patients an update on the goals our team members have made for the new year, as well as their accomplishments from the last!

How Far We Came In 2018

2018 was a year of focus and growth for our office. After the big move of 2017 to our new Pediatric and Teen dental location, both the dental office and the orthodontic office spent 2018 breathing in their new space. We’ve celebrated new milestones and fun giveaways with our patients and office family, incorporated new technologies and fun new treatment options—I’m looking at you GOLD BRACES. We’ve worked hard to make sure your dental and orthodontic experience is always TOP NOTCH. Thank you for all of your patience, your suggestions and your love for our doctors and our amazing team. You, our WONDERFUL patients, have made us all so thankful to be in this profession of serving others.

Our Roadmap For 2019

We are EXCITED to tackle this new year, 2019, with goals for health, mindfulness, presence, but importantly reflection on where we have come from and where we are going. Thinking back to our start over TEN years ago, it is the love our patients that has propelled us forward. Our office goal for 2019 is to continue to grow and surpass your expectations with a single-minded obsession. You have many choices for dental care and we are honored that you have chosen our little office!

Side note — Dr. Katie is also super excited about her new Bullet Journal resolution… #bulletjournal… mind blown. Shout out to Olivia Olson for the suggestion! Bring on that #organizedlife!!!

Check out this video for tips on keeping your resolutions:

What Are Your Goals This Year?

Now that we’ve told you about our goals for the new year, we want to hear about yours! Share your New Year’s resolutions in the comments below or on Facebook, and we look forward to seeing you this year!

Let’s all support each other in making our resolutions a reality!

Halloween, Candy, and YOUR BRACES

Halloween, Candy and YOUR BRACES

WE ALL LOVE EATING our favorite candy from time to time, especially around Halloween. But those treats can get tricky for orthodontic patients, because many of the standard goodies are harmful to braces. So how can you safely enjoy your spooky night of fun and sweets? Just follow our guidelines of what to aim for and what to avoid in the trick-or-treat bowls around your neighborhood.

Braces-Friendly Halloween Treats

The good news is that chocolate is safe! Any type of soft chocolate, from a bar to a peanut butter cup, is perfectly fine to eat with braces. But soft is the keyword there. Hard or large pieces of chocolate could still pose a danger to orthodontic equipment, and you should avoid chocolate with hard pieces of toffee embedded in it.

Cookies and brownies are another safe option for braces-wearers, so make sure you pay a visit to the house that always hands out baked goods this year! Again, softness is key. If someone gives you a hard cookie, give it a good long soak in cold milk before biting into it.

While whole caramel apples are firmly on the banned list, you can take that caramel apple home and chop it into slices. After that, it won’t pose a threat to your braces. Even better, apples are much healthier for your teeth than all that candy, so you can enjoy something both delicious and good for you!

Hard candies are okay, but there’s a catch: no chewing allowed. If you have the patience to be able to suck on it until it dissolves, a hard candy is safe. However, just because they’re safe for braces doesn’t make them great for your teeth, so we still recommend sticking to the other options.

Treats To Trade To Your No-Braces Friends

No matter how much you love them, there are some treats and candies that are definitely off-limits if you have braces. Anything hard, gummy, chewy, or sticky can put brackets and wires at risk. That means no taffy, gummies, caramels, toffee, popcorn, jelly beans, Tootsie Rolls, or Starbursts, and absolutely no gum. Any of these can pop or pull a bracket right off a tooth. It’s also important to avoid candies like M&Ms or Skittles, because their small size makes it easy for them to get into the wrong place and pop a bracket loose.

Check out this video for a reminder about banned foods and why to avoid them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do1VCqfiLgo

If you do end up with a bag full of banned treats, just trade those away to a friend or sibling without braces until your Halloween haul is all orthodontist-approved!

Don’t Forget To Clean Your Teeth!

The most important thing to remember after your night of fun and tasty treats is to take care of your teeth and your braces, because many of the treats that are safe to eat can still lead to tooth decay without proper attention to dental hygiene. So make sure to brush and floss away all traces of that sugary deliciousness. We’ll be checking the next time we see you that you’ve been keeping up with your braces cleaning routine!

Keep making wise choices to keep your braces safe!

4 Animals With Unusual Teeth

ANIMALS MIGHT NOT BE as concerned with maintaining their oral health and hygiene as we are, but that doesn’t stop some of them from having very interesting teeth! Like our teeth are adapted to an omnivorous diet, animal teeth are adapted to the foods they eat. In some cases, the results can get pretty strange. Today, we’re going to focus on four of the weirdest sets of chompers we could find.

The Tusks Of The Babirusa

Babirusas are pigs native to Indonesia, but these pigs aren’t quite like the farm animals we’re used to. No, these pigs have a serious dental problem in the form of their multiple pairs of very large tusks. These tusks are actually the babirusas’ canine teeth, which continue to grow through their lives. The males’ upper canines grow right through their upper lips and keep growing, sometimes so much that they end up curving all the way back around towards their skulls! Yikes!

The Icepick Teeth Of The Payara

The payara is a carnivorous fish from the Amazon Basin whose lower fangs have earned it nicknames like “vampire tetra” and “saber-tooth barracuda.” These long, thin fangs range from four to seven inches long, and the payara uses them to impale its prey, including piranhas! Payara can grow to up to four feet long and 80 pounds!

The Serrated Bill Of The Goosander

At first, you might think a goosander looks like any other duck, but if you catch one yawning or chomping down on food, you’ll notice its rows of tiny, razor-sharp teeth! These European birds are members of the Merganser genus, also called sawbills — so named because of the 150 teeth lining their bills, which are designed to saw through whatever they eat, such as small mammals and sometimes even other birds!

The Red Fangs Of The Triggerfish

Triggerfish are a group of about forty different species of brightly colored fish marked by the lines and spots in their scales, but don’t let their beautiful scales distract you from their teeth! Triggerfish have very powerful jaws and teeth that they use to crush the shells of crustaceans. The redtoothed triggerfish is perhaps the weirdest species of the group, with bright red fangs protruding from its mouth!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlmWckxsynQ

Taking Care Of Your Teeth

Do you know of any other weird teeth out their in the wild? We’d love to hear about them! In the meantime, make sure you continue taking great care of your own pearly whites by brushing and flossing regularly. We look forward to seeing you at your next appointment!

We love helping our patients take care of their teeth!

Karate Kick Those Sugar Bugs!

BRUSHING OUR TEETH is something we can get so used to doing that we don’t really think about it, but are we doing it the right way? It can be easy to get into some bad tooth-brushing habits, and the result can be that your teeth aren’t getting cleaned properly and you could be doing damage to your gums. So let’s take a moment to go over good brushing technique.

What To Avoid When Brushing Your Teeth
A few of the things we should avoid when we brush our teeth are brushing too hard, only brushing up and down or side-to-side, and always starting in the same place. Brushing too hard can damage our enamel and our gum tissue, which is why we should also avoid hard-bristled brushes.
When we only brush up and down or side-to-side, we tend to miss the spaces between teeth, which allows plaque to build up and leads to tooth decay. Because brushing our teeth is such a routine thing to do, it can be very easy to do it the same way every time, but when we always start brushing in the same place, we tend to pay unequal attention to the first teeth we brush compared to the last. Try mixing things up so that your whole mouth can get the same level of attention!

Brushing Your Teeth The Right Way
The first rule of good brushing is one you’ve likely heard all your life: brush twice a day every day for at least two minutes. Do whatever you need to do to make brushing your teeth an unskippable part of your morning and evening routines. You could even play music so you know how long to keep brushing!
However, brushing isn’t just about quantity; it’s also about quality. Make sure to LOOK with your eyes to make sure all of the food and plaque from the day has been brushed away!! For the best cleaning action, hold your toothbrush at a 45 degree angle and focus on the gum line. Use gentle circular motions to brush the outsides, insides, and chewing surfaces of every tooth. And don’t forget to brush or scrape your tongue before you’re done! Like daily flossing, tongue-scraping is another crucial step for getting rid of harmful bacteria (and it will help keep your breath fresh!).

Timing is also important. Our teeth often feel unpleasant after a meal, but as much as you want to clean them, make sure you wait at least half an hour after eating before you brush. The acids in our food and produced by oral bacteria soften our enamel right after we eat, and it takes about half an hour for our saliva to restore a neutral pH. If we brush too soon, we can actually brush away some of our enamel!

Check out these videos with tips and tricks straight from our doctors!

Your Dentist Is Your Greatest Resource
If you’d like more tips on tooth brushing techniques, just ask us! We can make sure your oral health routine is on track for keeping your teeth healthy for life. And don’t forget that an essential component of having healthy teeth is scheduling regular dental appointments!

Now set that timer and slay those sugar bugs!