How often should you have your teeth professionally cleaned? | Professional dental cleaning

How often should you have your teeth professionally cleaned?

When deciding how often professional tooth cleaning should be used, the individual patient situation, dental health and oral hygiene are decisive. The general recommendation for the frequency of professional tooth cleaning is 1-2 times per year. For young patients with good oral hygiene, one treatment per year may be sufficient.

Nevertheless, tartar should be removed once a year during the dental checkup. If you are particularly affected by tartar, you can independently remedy the problem between professional tooth cleaning sessions by scraping tartar after instruction from your dentist or prophylaxis assistant. The advice is different for patients who have already had periodontitis, a generalized inflammation of the entire periodontium.

For this group of patients, cleaning 3 or 4 times a year may be indicated. This frequency is necessary to restore and maintain dental health. Even in patients who have limited oral cavity hygiene, an increased frequency of cleaning is advisable.

How long should I not eat anything afterwards?

After a professional tooth cleaning, fluoridation is applied to all teeth. In order for this to take effect and protect the teeth after the treatment, it is advisable not to eat or drink for about an hour. If the gums have been numbed during the cleaning, you should not eat or drink until the anesthetic effect has completely worn off. Furthermore, in the first 2 hours after the treatment, you should avoid colored food such as berries, tea, wine and coffee in order to maintain the whitening effect for a long time. If the sealing of the teeth is guaranteed after the 2 hours, it is possible to eat and drink again without any renunciation.

How long after that should one not smoke?

During a professional dental cleaning all plaque deposits on the teeth and under the gums are removed. During this process the gums are irritated and stressed so much that bleeding can also occur. It can take one or two days until the gums completely regenerate.

During this time you should not smoke, because smoking has a negative effect on the healing of wounds. Smoking directly after cleaning can lead to complications and wound healing disorders. The gums can become inflamed and the healing time can be prolonged.

This can also be associated with pain. Certain foods and stimulants such as blueberries, red wine or tea, medicines such as tetracycline or antiseptics such as chlorhexidine digluconate can lead to discoloration of the tooth surfaces. This is especially true for smokers.

Here it is mainly pipe smokers and cigar smokers, where the tar residues sometimes lead to massive discoloration. The recommended toothpastes for smokers should not be used frequently due to their high abrasiveness. The dentist can remove these discolorations by using a so-called Air Flow, a powder jet device. In this process, the aesthetically disturbing deposits of salt crystals are removed with high pressure, similar to a sand blasting machine. The electron microscope shows that the enamel surface is also slightly damaged, but this can be repaired with the help of saliva.