Enjoy Your Best Smile With Routine Checkups
A lot of patients will call up and say, “Hey listen, I’d like to make a new patient appointment and get my teeth cleaned.” Our staff is real good about it. They’ll say, “If we can, we’ll do a cleaning for you, but the doctor will see you and diagnose what your needs are. If that’s all you need, we’ll do that.”
If a new patient comes in and they’re pretty clean and they’re, what we call like, a ‘type one’ gums and mouth, as far as their tissue health, I’ll go ahead and scale them right there myself. I’ll have the assistant polish and floss their teeth, and we’ll go over some home care things with them.
Now, during the exam, we check the gums for periodontal disease, and if they do have some periodontal disease, then we’ll sit there and we’ll talk to them about what’s going on, and say, “Listen, I know you wanted to have a cleaning, but you have this, and this, and this going on, so it wouldn’t really be doing you a good service to do a cleaning because you’re ignoring a deeper problem, so this is what’s going on and this is how we take care of it.” It’s an education process with the patient.