Smile with Confidence: A Comprehensive Guide to Dental Health and Care

Tag: orthodontics

Types of Braces

The trend today is toward embracing good dental health through natural choices – shunning fast or fried foods in favor of those with nutritious value, forsaking the couch and big TV for a walking or biking regimen.  This is because Americans are living longer, and they want to enjoy those extra years in good health.

Good dental health and keeping your own teeth longer is fast becoming an objective as well.  We now realize that with a little TLC to our teeth, they might last us the rest of our days, and we’ll not need to resort to dentures or partial plates.

Health Benefits of Braces

Braces aren’t just for kids anymore.  More and more adults are getting braces to avoid long-term dental problems that result because of misalignment of teeth or the jaw.  While the primary reason for having braces put on your teeth is for aesthetic reasons, such as straightening the teeth, spacing out crowded teeth and closing gaps in your smile, they can also be utilized for better jaw alignment, especially if you would be destined to suffer the consequences of TMJ, or with tempomandibular joint issues.  If you suffer from TMJ, you know that opening and closing your mouth, or even masticating, (a more technical word for chewing), can cause pain.  Braces can help to correct the jaw defects which cause TMJ, so that means no more headaches, earaches and that annoying, as well as painful, clicking.

Realignment of the jaw will ensure that biting or chewing issues will be eliminated as well as life-long conundrums like tooth decay and gum disease.  If your teeth were crooked or crowded before undergoing the orthodontic process, and then later in life you needed to have dentures, then those plate(s) would be ill-fitting, without the benefit of braces and correction of overbites and underbite issues.