Bad dental habits
You could be damaging your teeth without even knowing it! Your bad habits might just be prompting cavities. Oral infections and even costly dental repairs unfortunately, many people don’t even realize the seriousness of their bad habits until it’s too late.
Here are some bad dental habits that are harming your oral and general health.
At Amirad Family Dentistry, we try to find patient’s bad oral habits and treat them with the most advanced methods.
Grinding your teeth or excessively clenching your jaw can pose a wide range of problems when it comes to your oral health.
This bad habit also known as bruxism, can chip tooth enamel, cause severe facial or jaw pain, incite tension- type headaches and can even result in broken or fractured teeth that require crowns or replacements with dental implants.
Most often, grinding teeth or jaw clenching is caused by stress or by sleep disordered breathing.
All too often, people who grind their teeth don’t even know they’re doing it as tooth grinding, often happens while asleep!
So how can you know if you’re grinding your teeth?
Some symptoms include:
• Loose Teeth
• A sore, Tired jaw
• Neck aches, earaches and headaches
• A clicking sound when you open and close your mouth
If you are experiencing any of these symptoms, it’s best you see your dentist as soon as possible.
At Amirad Family Dentistry we will work with you to find ways to minimize your tooth grinding. This could include a bite adjustment or recommending a Night Guard made to fit over your teeth to help prevent damage caused by grinding your teeth or clenching your jaw while you sleep.
At Amirad Family Dentistry we also use a new method of injecting Botox into the mastication muscles to relieve bruxism.
This is the best solution, especially for those who have Bruxism during the day.
Are you tired, stressed out, and moody because of interrupted sleep?
When a sleeping person stops breathing for 10 or more seconds, they have “apnea”. OSAS, or Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome, is one type of sleep apnea.
Lack of adequate breath during sleep reduces airflow, causing the brain to tell the body to wake up and breath. In some cases, sleep apnea patients only move into a lighter stage of sleep, while other times, patients wake completely.
Many factors may contribute to airway blockage from the size of passages and oral or airway structures, to swelling of passage ways or position of the tongue.
The sleep apnea patient’s snores can disturb a sleeping partner’s rest, too.
The gold standard of care used to be a CPAP machine which is a Continuous Positive Air Pressure machine to force air to your lungs.
It works, but research has shown that the compliance rate after 1 year of use dwindles to a meager 10%.
Because of the bulkiness of the machine and the limitation of movement. It usually finds itself collecting dust in the corner of the room.
Even more effective, patients may now wear dental appliances that reposition the tongue or mandible (lower jawbone) to facilitate breathing.
A Swedish study showed that the Anterior Mandibular Positioning dental device (AMP) is actually more effective than surgical therapies.
At Amirad Family Dentistry we have successfully treated patients with this appliance to the extent that snoring completely stops!
