Your body cannot grow more permanent teeth so it is important to protect them. So make sure to eat properly, wear a mouth guard if you play sports or grind your teeth, and use care if you get oral piercings. Your teeth are strong, but they, and your mouth in general, need protection.
Mouth Guards
If you play a sport, it is very important that you wear a mouth guard to protect your teeth if your face gets hit. A mouth guard can absorb the shock of contact and lessen the damage that could occur.
Mouth guards can also be worn at night if you grind your teeth while you sleep. Grinding your teeth can wear down the enamel, one of your natural defenses against cavities. A dentist can make you a mouth guard that is specially formed to fit your teeth or you can buy one at a sporting goods store.
Eating for Your Teeth
What you eat has a big impact on your oral health, so be sure to eat foods that are healthy for your teeth. One of the most harmful types of food is sugar, which can mix with plaque to form the acid that causes cavities. Sodas are very high in sugar, and sugar from a drink can cause just as much, if not more, harm than food. Instead of having sugary foods or a soda as a snack, eat them with your meals.
When you eat an entire meal, your mouth produces much more saliva than during a simple snack. The saliva helps to clean off the sugar from your teeth as you chew. For a snack, you should choose healthier foods like fruits, vegetables or cheeses.
Dental Protection is using its vast experience from many years of protecting the dental team to increase the value of reading its Annual Review. Working with almost 54,000 members in 70 countries and territories worldwide provides a unique perspective on the way that problems can arise in dentistry. Dental Protection has assembled some of that information to create a series of practical tools that can be adopted by dentists and dental care professionals everywhere to improve all aspects of the care and treatment that they provide.
Called Tools for improvement, this years' Annual Review takes a look at the tools for quality improvement, suggests ways to prioritise our time and effort to maximum advantage, and applies these principles to a variety of clinical and non-clinical situations to illustrate their practical use. Tools for Improvement joins the growing library of risk management content that is available to members in a variety of media formats. As an additional benefit, members can also obtain three hours verifiable CPD online after reading this year's publication.
Kevin Lewis, Director of Dental Protection, said, "At all stages in our professional career, and in all areas of our professional life we encounter opportunities for improvement. Sometimes adversity can be the stimulus, while on other occasions we simply want to get better or to become more successful. In dentistry we are continually confronted with new techniques, new materials, new equipment and new technology, all of which can challenge our existing way of doing things. When faced with these multiple pressures and opportunities the greatest benefits will come when we continually seek to identify suitable areas for improvement that are relevant to us, and then choose the right tools for development, applied at the right time and in the right way. The best routes will not necessarily be the same for all of us.
