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Self-Care Toothbrush Tips for Special Needs

Maintaining good oral hygiene can be a challenge, especially if you have developed a health condition that makes brushing and flossing more difficult, or have been in an accident that created new limitations. Dental professionals want to help all dental patients keep their mouths healthy, and they offer these suggestions about oral hygiene.

Dental Brushing Tips

Problems in hands, wrists, arms, and shoulders can hinder a person's ability to brush and floss. While each situation is different, there are some suggestions that have been effective in making dental care easier:

• Use a wide elastic band to attach the toothbrush to your hand for extra gripping power.
• Attach a small rubber ball, a sponge, or a rubber grip to the toothbrush handle with strong tape. This enhances gripping power and is often useful when hand or arm movement is weakened or limited.
• Use a longer wooden dowel, a ruler, or plastic rod to lengthen the toothbrush handle, wrapping it securely with strong tape. This longer length may help in more easily reaching your mouth.
• Use an electric or sonic toothbrush.

Dental Flossing Tips

If limitations make brushing and oral hygiene harder, flossing may be an even bigger challenge. Depending on your limitations, try these techniques:

• Use a piece of floss, about 18" long, and wind one end of floss around each finger instead of holding it. This will increase your grip and prevent the floss from dropping out of your fingers with each tooth you floss.
• Hold the floss tightly and seesaw it back and forth between the teeth, instead of pushing the floss right through.
• Tie the floss into a long circle instead of using one long piece, which may make it easier to hold and less likely to drop from your hands.
• Try using a floss holder, available wherever oral hygiene products are sold.

By Danine M. Fresch, DDS

+Jim Du Molin is a leading Internet search expert helping individuals and families connect with the right dentist in their area. Visit his author page.

Oral Health and Early Disease Detection

Most of your dentist's patients enjoy robust health, and he or she is thankful for that. In fact, if you are faithful about your "recall" appointments (regular check-ups) he or she probably sees you more often than your physician does. That means much more to him or her than finding a small cavity, or more than a chance to catch up on your comings and goings between visits.

As your primary dental health care provider, your dentist has a singular and weighty responsibility: early detection of disease. When he or she sizes up the health of your gums, tongue, neck, jaw, the mental check-list is long, he or she looks and feels. He or she "invisibly" observes your general health, head, skin, glands, sinuses (and teeth, of course).

What is your dentist looking for? Simply put, anything wrong. Among them: dry mouth, bacterial infections, any lesions on the mucous membranes, gum color and texture, soreness or ulcerations, you get the idea. It's important for you to share with your dentist any general health problems you may have noticed or changes in medications. He or she needs the whole picture.

Practicing preventive dentistry is very important. There are more than 200 known diseases of the oral cavity. Your dentist is on the look-out for all of them. Not only can an oral problem signal local trouble, but it may indicate something systemic, something throughout your body.

For this reason, your six-month recall visit may be the most important exam you have all year. If a cavity is found, that can be fixed. If evidence of something more serious is found, then you benefit from the advantage of early detection.

Your dentist and dental hygienist want all of their patients to take these exams seriously. A cavity or canker sore, after all, is one thing. Your whole health, quite another.

+Jim Du Molin is a leading Internet search expert helping individuals and families connect with the right dentist in their area. Visit his author page.