Healthy Smiles Family Dental

Gum disease isn’t just a matter of a little swelling. It’s an infection that could spread elsewhere in the body and cause a lot of pain. But it is treatable, and the earlier people seek intervention, the better. At Healthy Smiles Family Dental in Salem, we help patients recover from gum abscesses, but we need people to know when to come see us. The early stage of gum disease is gingivitis. If allowed to progress, it becomes periodontitis, in which the walls of the gum pocket recede from around the root of a tooth. Abscesses are pockets filled with pus, a fluid made up of infectious bacteria, dead tissue, and acid. When an abscess forms near the gum line in a person with gingivitis, it is called a gingival abscess, and when it forms in the gum pocket of someone with periodontitis, it is a periodontal abscess. An abscess will cause persistent pain, a bad taste, and may prevent the patient from fully opening their mouth. It may also induce fever, as bacteria enters the bloodstream. We ca...

If you’ve suffered from missing or damaged teeth, you may have considered implant-supported crowns to replace them. But if you also have diabetes, you may wonder whether implants are safe for you. People with diabetes are especially vulnerable to tooth loss, so we at Healthy Smiles Family Dental in Salem want them to be able to make informed decisions about their treatment. We thought it would be a good idea to pass along a review of the research into diabetes and implant survival . People with diabetes may suffer blood vessel damage. This not only makes them more vulnerable to gum inflammation, it also means they take longer to recover from injuries. Doctors historically feared that people with diabetes would have higher rates of short-term implant failure because they would not be able to recover from the incisions made to place the implant posts. But although the research found that it takes longer in diabetic patients for their implants to integrate with their jaw bones, as long a...

Tooth extractions are ideally rare, but when they are necessary, we at Healthy Smiles Family Dental see our patients through safely. Many adolescents need to have their wisdom teeth removed to prevent alignment problems, and extractions are sometimes done on teeth with pulp infections after root canal treatment has proven unsuccessful. But in emergency situations, tooth extractions may not be preplanned, which is why we want our patients to be familiar with how to prevent a dry socket. A simple extraction is one in which the tooth is wiggled loose until it can be pulled out with pliers. A complex extraction is one requiring an incision to be made into the gum tissue. Dry sockets are likelier to result from complex extractions. When a tooth is removed, a blood clot ordinarily forms to seal off the socket, protecting it from pathogens and keeping moisture locked inside. A clot may have more difficulty forming over a surgical incision, or it may come loose more easily. Prior to the extrac...