Mouth Care Comes Clean by Ellie Phillips DDS

Author:Ellie Phillips DDS
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781632990952
Publisher: River Grove Books
Published: 2018-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

WEAK ENAMEL

Weakened enamel is not able to adequately protect the vulnerable live tissues of the dentin and pulp inside a tooth. If you have damaged or softened enamel, you will usually notice that your teeth feel sensitive to hot or cold temperatures, and this progressively worsens if your teeth continue to be harmed. Eventually, the demineralization damage will become irreversible and potentially result in the death of the tooth. When a tooth has died, the dead part will need to be cleaned and the space blocked with a root filling. Finally, after a root has been filled, the tooth will need some kind of protective covering to prevent the tooth from splitting or absorbing mouth liquids into its core. Most often this means making a gold or porcelain crown. Weak enamel was the cause of this drastic and expensive scenario, yet strengthening enamel is relatively easy and should be something you do daily to prevent these problems.

Under high-power magnification, the design of natural enamel that creates the crown covering of a tooth is seen as an awesome construction. The structure resembles intersecting cathedral arches, radiating in every direction. Small rod-shaped prisms build this arch structure, and the rods are arranged in a pattern that gives healthy enamel incredible resistance to biting forces. The enamel covering a pristine tooth protects the underlying tooth during biting and chewing to resist damage and not harm the opposing teeth. The rod prisms radiate like sunrays or porcupine spines at right angles to the tooth’s surface. These rods are longest where enamel is thickest, at the pointy cusps that dig into food as we bite.

Enamel gets progressively thinner on the sides of a tooth, thinning toward the gumline, and it eventually disappears at the junction where the tooth root is covered in cement. As enamel thins, the rodshaped prisms become shorter, more fragile, and more easily dislodged. Mouth acidity can weaken short rod prisms and loosen them. Damaged enamel crystals may split away from the tooth surface in flakes, leaving a void on the side of the tooth close to the root, at the gumline. When enamel crystals flake at the same time from multiple teeth, a sensitive channel can develop at the gumline. Mouth acidity attacks everywhere, but its damage is first seen on the most fragile crystals, the shortest ones. When these crystals break away, usually simultaneously, a groove will form, and sometimes patients can be blamed for aggressive toothbrushing or tooth grinding.

The underlying problems, however, are loss of the protective biofilm and mouth acidity. I always work with clients to try and determine the reason for these problems and figure out what may have damaged their mouth’s ecology and caused acidic damage, so we can ensure their teeth are protected in the future. Sometimes this damage was from acidic saliva that was a consequence of stress, pregnancy, or hormonal imbalance. A dry mouth can make acidic damage worse, and brushing acid-softened teeth after meals or after drinking something acidic like wine can also create serious problems.

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