How can we help you?
We strongly encourage and invite questions from our patients. An educated and informed patient is a patient who is empowered to take control over his or her own healthcare. Please take a look through this selection of questions our patients often ask. If your question is not answered here or if you’d like further information, please give us a call at 715-849-5667
How to Choose a Cosmetic Dentist
Digital X-rays and KaVo Dental Laser
While pain is frequently a signal that something is wrong, teeth are unusual. In most cases, no discomfort is noticed at all until a dental problem is well-developed. In fact, pain is often one of the last symptoms that people experience when they have a cavity.
Here’s the problem with this – by the time you feel pain, the nerve of your tooth may be involved, and the problem can no longer be solved with conservative measures. You may need a root canal and a crown to treat the damage and save the tooth.
At our office, we prefer to practice proactive, preventive care. This means that we want to head off problems early while conservative and simple treatment is still an option. Our patients greatly prefer this approach as well!
To help us with this, we rely on advanced technology such as digital x-rays and the KaVo DIAGNOdent laser to identify tiny cavities or cavities hidden under the enamel, which are not visible by the naked eye.
Regular preventive care appointments are a necessity because these provide you with an opportunity for us to catch small problems before they can grow into big problems. This means simpler, more comfortable, less costly dentistry, which is something that makes everyone happy!
X-rays are one of our most effective diagnostic tools. They help us to see what is going on beneath the surface of your teeth and underneath your gums. This allows us to identify small problems, which often have no symptoms at all, so we can treat them before they develop into big, painful problems.
We understand that many of our patients might be concerned about the amount of radiation that they might be exposed to because of dental x-rays. Rest assured that even traditional film dental x-rays expose you to a very small amount of radiation. At our office, we take your safety a step further and rely on digital x-rays, which expose you to up to 90% less radiation than even traditional film x-rays!
We also do our best to only take x-rays when necessary. This will depend a great deal on your individual needs. If you are prone to cavities or other problems – or we are tracking an ongoing concern like bone loss, we will likely recommend more frequent x-rays. If you are overall healthy, however, with few dental concerns, we can take x-rays less frequently. We will still recommend x-rays on a schedule, however, because they are the best way to catch problems early so they can be treated with simple, conservative treatments.