How Often Should You Really See a Dentist?

Almost everyone has heard that a dental visit is due every six months. It is a reasonable default and a poor rule, because it treats a patient with no fillings and healthy gums exactly like one with active gum disease. What the interval should really track is how quickly things go wrong in your particular mouth.

What lengthens or shortens the interval

• A history of decay, or new cavities at recent visits, shortens it.
• Gum disease, or gums that bleed, shortens it, often to every three or four months for scaling.
• Smoking or paan use shortens it, both for gum disease and because the mouth needs checking for other changes.
• Diabetes shortens it, because gum disease progresses faster and heals slower.
• Crowns, bridges, implants or braces shorten it, because there is more to monitor and more that can fail quietly.
• A clean history, healthy gums and good home cleaning can reasonably stretch it beyond six months, and your dentist should be willing to say so.

Why waiting for pain is the expensive route

Dental problems are cheap and simple early, and neither of those later. Decay caught in enamel is a small filling. The same decay left a year longer reaches the nerve and becomes a root canal and a crown, at several times the cost and across several appointments instead of one.

The trap is that the early stage has no symptoms at all. Pain is not an early warning in dentistry, it is a late one. By the time a tooth hurts, the cheap options have usually gone.

What a check-up should actually include

• An examination of every tooth, not only the one you mentioned.
• A gum assessment, including where the gum sits against the tooth.
• X-rays where they are justified, because decay between teeth and early bone loss are invisible otherwise.
• A look at the soft tissues: tongue, cheeks, palate and floor of the mouth.
• A plain account of what was found and what, if anything, needs doing, including the option of watching something rather than treating it today.

Children

Children should be seen from the time their first teeth arrive, and usually more often than adults, because decay moves faster through the thinner enamel of a baby tooth. Early visits also do something that is hard to recover later: they let a child get used to a dental chair before anything hurts.

If it has been more than a year since your last visit, book a check-up rather than waiting for a reason. The point of the appointment is to find the problems that are not yet announcing themselves.