How is Gum Disease Treated
El Paso, TX
 Gum disease, also known as periodontal disease, is a common disease that affects the health of your teeth and gums. According to the Center for Disease Control, approximately half of all Americans over the age of 30 have periodontitis. Periodontitis is the advanced stage of gum disease and requires more drastic treatments.
The earlier you begin receiving treatment for gum disease, the better the outcome. Our team at Bruce Gopin, DDS, MS provides a number of both surgical and non-surgical treatment options for gum disease. The goal of these treatments is to provide you with the most favorable outcomes and restore the health of your smile.
Non Surgical Treatments
As long as your gum disease has not progressed, our team will be able to treat your gum disease and its symptoms with non-surgical treatments. Non-surgical treatments will be done during normal dental exams and cleanings. They require no recovery time and allow you to resume your normal daily routine immediately afterward.
The primary non-surgical treatment option involves scaling. First, our team will thoroughly examine and clean your teeth and gums. They will then utilize a metal hand tool to scale your teeth. Scaling is done to remove the hardened tartar from your teeth and prevent bacteria from accumulating.
After scaling is completed, they may complete a process called root planing. Root planing involves smoothing out the surface of your tooth’s root and ensuring that the gums and root do not have any tartar or plaque build-up interfering with their connection. Root planing allows your gums to heal and reattach to your root.
Depending on the severity of tartar build-up and your needs, our team may recommend increasing the frequency of your cleanings and exams so that they can complete planing and scaling at more frequent intervals. More frequent cleaning and scaling intervals, such as every three months, improves the success rate of this procedure and provides you with a favorable outcome.
Surgical Treatments
If you are experiencing advanced gum disease, our team can still restore the health and appearance of your smile. However, surgical treatments may be necessary. A highly successful and commonly used surgical treatment for gum disease is pocket reduction surgery.
During this surgery, our professional will make an incision in your affected gumline, scale your teeth, and suture your gums back into place to reduce the size of the pockets. Pocket reduction surgery allows our team to provide continued treatment of your disease through the use of scaling and root planing by reducing the pocket size between your teeth and gums. It also makes it more difficult for tartar and plaque to accumulate in these pockets.
If bone density loss has already begun, another surgical treatment is a bone graft. During a bone graft, our team will graft bone fragments to the damaged areas of your jawline. This procedure will restore the density and strength of your jawbone and protect your remaining teeth. Recovery time for this procedure is only a few days, but it can take up to a year for the grafted material to fuse with your bone.
If you are experiencing gum disease, our team at Bruce Gopin, DDS, MS can help with our wealth of knowledge and patient-first approach. Schedule your appointment today by calling us at . |
