Have you ever said, or heard anyone talk about having “soft teeth?” Well, this is one of the many myths about teeth and oral health that abound. Read on to learn more. Thanks for visiting Advanced Endodontics of Lakewood, OH.
Most people do not look forward to seeing their dentist. Surveys about the most loved or hated professions are often not kind to dentists.
Perhaps this is why dentists are sometimes portrayed as sinister characters in movies. For example, in Little Shop of Horrors, Steve Martin plays Orin, the evil dentist. In one song, he quotes his mom, singing: “You have a talent for causin’ things pain. Son, be a dentist. People will pay you to be inhumane.” And how about the sadistic dentist played by Laurence Olivier interrogating and torturing Dustin Hoffman’s character with a dental drill in Marathon Man? These characters seem to play on the fear many people have of seeing their dentist and getting dental care that may be painful.
While it’s true that going to the dentist isn’t at the top of things I do for fun, it usually isn’t that bad. Unlike Orin, my dentist is great about making sure I’m numb before getting to work.
Dentists, of course, just want to do what’s best for their patients’ oral health. Your experience at the dentist should generally be pain-free, given modern medications and procedures.
Myths about teeth abound. Perhaps you’ve wondered about how to whiten stained teeth or what people mean when they say they have “soft teeth.” Maybe you never had a chance to ask your dentist—it’s hard to do when your mouth is full of instruments!
Here are five of my favorite dental myths:
1. All stains can be easily whitened or cleaned away.
Many things can discolor teeth, but not all of them can be fixed by a professional cleaning or tooth-whitening procedure. Tobacco, coffee and some foods can cause teeth to turn yellow or brown. Ingesting or inhaling certain metals can also change tooth color. For example, copper can turn teeth green, while mercury can turn them black. These stains usually come off easily with either a professional cleaning or a tooth-whitening procedure.
The discoloration related to damage or death of the pulp, the soft core of the tooth that contains blood vessels and nerves, is harder to fix, but it’s not impossible. The procedure involves putting bleach into the part of the tooth that contains the pulp.
Some stains just don’t respond well to whitening or cleaning. To deal with these types of stains, you generally need to get a procedure called bonding, in which a dentist paints a plasticlike material onto the tooth. For example, taking the antibiotic tetracycline in childhood, when your permanent teeth are developing, can cause stains that are hard or impossible to whiten. Or if your childhood drinking water had an excess of certain minerals in it, such as copper or silver, your teeth may be uneven in color.
Ironically, too much tooth whitening can make teeth look gray, because it turns the teeth translucent. How much whitening is too much differs from person to person, says Dr. John D. Da Silva of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. “It varies depending on tooth size, shape and thickness of enamel. That’s one of the reasons why you should see your dentist before bleaching your teeth,” he says.
2. “Soft” teeth cause cavities.
You may have heard someone say he has “soft” teeth and that’s why he gets lots of cavities. The truth is that teeth are hard. The enamel that covers the part of the teeth above the gum line is the hardest substance in the human body. It’s not softness that causes cavities—in fact, cavities are formed when acid produced by bacteria dissolves the hard enamel. This missing enamel (the “soft spot” in the tooth) is the cavity. But the tooth itself is not soft.
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