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Franklin Dental Center Blog

Evaluating the Need for Dentures in Tyler, TX

October 24, 2022

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — franklindentalteam @ 1:45 pm

Dentures in Tyler, TX | Franklin Dental Center

Call it bad luck, but some people will have to consider dentures at some point in their lives. Here are the warning signs indicating you need artificial teeth and the different available treatment options.

Precursors are easily spotted. Suppose you’re experiencing one or more risk factors right now. In that case, we encourage you to visit Franklin Dental Center, your dentist in Tyler, for a consultation right away.

SEVERE TOOTHACHES

The most obvious sign is a sizable toothache that won’t go away. This aching could signal decay that has made its way to your nerve. While a root canal may be an excellent option to save the tooth, sometimes the decay is beyond the point of salvage, which will require extraction and wearing dentures.

RED AND SWOLLEN GUMS

Sensitive and swollen gum tissue is the first warning sign of worsening periodontal disease. Dr. Franklin-Pitts can quickly treat early signs of gum disease, gingivitis, and bad breath with thorough professional cleaning, scaling and root planing, and prescription products. Catching periodontal disease in the early stage is vital to saving teeth and gums. 

LOOSE OR MOVING TEETH

When your teeth start to loosen or shift, it is a good sign that dentures are in the near future. When teeth are loose, it signals decay and may result from periodontal disease. Significant damage may occur under the gums, where infection can fester without you noticing. You need to consult your dentist if you see gaps growing wider between your teeth.

DIFFICULTY CHEWING OR DIGESTING FOODS

Painful chewing while eating hard or chewy foods indicates needing dentures. Another sign of decay is chronic indigestion. Because your teeth aren’t functioning correctly and chewing is difficult, you’re more likely to take larger bites, leading to stomach pains. If you’re experiencing any of these symptoms, it’s time to visit Franklin Dental Center for a consultation.

YOU’RE ALREADY MISSING TEETH

You must act now if you’ve already lost one or more teeth. The longer you go without dentures, the more you risk losing your remaining teeth. Without all your natural teeth’ support, the adjacent teeth shift faster and become weaker, along with jaw bone loss. Let’s take a look at all the options:

Partial dentures are the better option when you haven’t experienced substantial tooth decay. Partials only replace a portion of your teeth and rely on healthy teeth around the denture for support. 

Immediate dentures are just that, immediate. You can replace your missing teeth right away. Although, the gums can take up to two months to heal enough to support traditional dentures. You’ll need several adjustments to ensure the best fit, as your gums shrink after extraction. 

Complete dentures can only be worn once your gums have healed after extraction, usually two months. Most modern full dentures have an integrated support system that allows you to wear them without denture adhesive. These types of dentures are best for those who have lost all their top or bottom teeth.

Get Your Dentures in Tyler, Texas

The thought of dentures can be scary, but knowing you have several treatment options is comforting. If you’re experiencing any above symptoms, we encourage you to schedule a visit to Franklin Dental Center, your place for dentures in Tyler, TX. We can help you evaluate the best course of treatment for your oral health.

An Inside Look at How Your Dentist Color-Matches Dental Crowns

September 15, 2022

Filed under: Uncategorized — franklindentalteam @ 8:09 pm
Patient smiling while dentist color-matches dental crown

Teeth aren’t just white or yellow – they come in a wide range of shades! So, you might naturally be curious about how your dentist picks the perfect color for your dental crown. You want it to blend in perfectly with your existing smile, after all. To learn a few steps they take to ensure it’s the perfect match, keep reading.

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Why Is There a Bump on My Gums?

August 3, 2022

Filed under: Uncategorized — franklindentalteam @ 10:14 pm
Woman covering mouth

Gum irritation is very common and usually is caused by buildups of plaque and bacteria along the gumline. This can cause bleeding and redness of the gums, but what if you notice a new bump? There are many reasons why this can occur. While it usually isn’t an emergency, this is definitely something you should mention to your dentist so you can rule out more serious issues. Read on to learn about the most common causes of bumps on the gums.

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Can Gum Disease Run in Your Family?

July 20, 2022

Filed under: Uncategorized — franklindentalteam @ 10:42 am
Person with gum disease

You’ve heard the phrase “runs in the family,” right? It refers to how people can inherit body traits from their parents, grandparents, etc. You might have your father’s eyes, your mother’s facial structure, or your grandmother’s smile. You probably know you can inherit a risk for medical problems too. As it turns out, things like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and depression have genetic factors. That said, did you know gum disease can also run in the family? To learn more, here’s a summary of the condition’s symptoms, genetic influence, and prevention tips.

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How to Choose a Great Dentist in Tyler, TX

June 24, 2022

Filed under: Uncategorized — franklindentalteam @ 5:14 pm

tyler dentist

THERE ARE A NUMBER of reasons why someone might need a new dentist in Tyler, TX. Maybe their insurance changed, they’re new to the area, or they simply haven’t looked for a dentist yet.

Whatever the reason, if you don’t already have a great local dentist, it’s a good idea to choose one now so that you and your family can get regular dental exams and so that you’ll be ready in the event of a dental emergency. Here are a few ways to make sure you find the best dentist in the Tyler area to take care of your family’s dental health needs.

Five Factors to Consider in Your Tyler Dentist Search

Many variables play a role in big decisions like which dentist is right for you and your family, and while the ranking is up to you, here are five that should be on every patient’s list.

  1. The location of the practice is definitely something to consider. How close is it to your home, or to your child’s school? Is the distance convenient enough that twice-yearly checkups will be easy? Set up a range based on your answers to these questions and look for dentists inside it.
  2. What is the dentist’s reputation? Within the radius you’re willing to travel, which dentists have the best reputations among their other patients? Find out by checking Yelp and Google, and ask around if you know any of the patients in person. You can also get recommendations from neighbors and friends.
  3. Do you need a dentist with a certain specialization? Do you need a family practice, someone particularly good with kids, someone who specializes in diagnosing and treating gum disease or root canals, or someone who offers dental implants? Do you want the security of a dentist who offers emergency services? Be sure to research different types of dentists to find the one that suits your needs best.
  4. As important as it is to get high-quality dental care, cost is an important factor too. What’s your household’s budget for dental care? Do you have dental insurance or can you get it? Keep in mind that preventing oral health problems or treating them early will be much cheaper than waiting until they get serious, so slightly greater upfront costs are often well worth the investment.
  5. How comfortable are you around the dentist? It doesn’t matter how affordable and skilled a dentist is if you can’t relax in their practice. Go in for a visit ahead of time to get a sense of the place, the team, and the dentist. Good dentists always prioritize patient comfort!

We Can’t Wait to Meet You and Your Family

Hopefully, this list gives you a good place to start in your search for a great dentist in Tyler, but if you’re still uncertain and live or work in the area, come see us! We can answer your questions about our practice and find out if we’re a good fit for you and your family’s dental needs.

We love meeting new patients!

Top image used under CC0 Public Domain license. Image cropped and modified from original.
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.

How Do I Find a Good Dentist Near Me?

April 29, 2022

Filed under: Uncategorized — franklindentalteam @ 12:43 pm

dentist near me

PEOPLE MIGHT NEED to find a new dentist for all sorts of reasons, so they wonder “how do I find a great dentist near me?” Maybe they moved to a new city. Maybe their old dentist retired. Maybe they’re new parents and need to find a dentist for their child. Whatever the reason is, we recommend not waiting until an urgent dental health emergency pops up before finding a dentist that fits your needs. Here are five important factors to keep in mind when searching for the best dentist for you.

1. Location, Location, Location!

How close is the practice to your home? To your child’s school or where they play sports? To your workplace? Make sure the distance isn’t so great that making it to twice-yearly checkups will become a major inconvenience. It’s a good idea to decide on a radius that seems doable for you and your family, then determine who the best dentist is within that radius. On the other hand, there might be a dentist slightly farther away who is still worth it for other reasons!

2. Which Dentist Near Me Has a Great Reputation?

What kind of reviews does the dentist have? What are their other patients saying about them? Check out the Yelp and Google reviews and maybe ask around your neighborhood, coworkers, and friend group to see if anyone you know is familiar with that particular dentist. While there can sometimes be hidden gems, a lot of good feedback is generally a positive sign.

3. What Specialties Can They Claim?

A dental practice that operates close to you and has fantastic reviews might still not be right for you if they don’t offer some of the services you think you’re likely to need. How good are they with child patients? Do they offer cosmetic treatments? How much experience do they have with root canal therapy or treating gum disease? Do some research into a dentist’s specialties to see if they’re a good fit.

4. How Well Do They Fit Your Budget?

Sometimes a dentist’s only flaw is the cost of their services in comparison to your budget, or that they aren’t in your dental insurance network. It’s still important to find a dentist for regular appointments in this case, because those checkups are much easier on a budget than a serious dental problem that could’ve been caught and treated cheaply in an early stage. Finding a budget-friendly dentist is an excellent investment, both financially and in terms of dental health.

5. Patient Comfort

If you aren’t comfortable around a dentist or within their practice, then the other factors might not matter much to you. It’s a good idea to pay a practice you’re considering an early visit just to get a sense of the place and the staff. A good dentist will always prioritize patient comfort, especially considering how many patients struggle with dental anxiety!

Meanwhile, keep up those oral hygiene habits!

We Look Forward to Meeting You!

If you weren’t sure how to start looking for a great dentist before, we hope we’ve given you a few ideas of where to begin! If you want to learn more about our practice, just give us a call or stop by. You can also check our business page, and make sure to get directions before you head our way. We’re happy to answer any questions you may have!

Thank you for trusting us with your dental health needs!

Top image used under CC0 Public Domain license. Image cropped and modified from original.
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.

What to Do If Your Dental Bridge Fell Out 

April 4, 2022

Filed under: Uncategorized — franklindentalteam @ 1:25 am

“The bridge is out! The bridge is out!” To many people, that is a quote by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in the 1994 summer blockbuster True Lies. Well, at least action movie enthusiasts over age 40 will probably get the reference. If the bridge is out in your real life, however, you could be facing a dental emergency! A dental bridge connects to your natural teeth on both sides – filling in the gap with custom-fitted false teeth. They are strong, reliable, and look very natural in most cases. Keep reading to learn from your emergency dentist in Tyler potential reasons why your dental bridge fell out, as well as how to respond.

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Who’s Your Emergency Dentist in Tyler, TX?

March 1, 2022

Filed under: Uncategorized — franklindentalteam @ 11:00 pm

emergency dentist tyler tx

A LITTLE BIT OF PREP work makes a huge difference when an emergency happens, including an oral injury that requires an emergency dentist. What exactly can we do to prepare for something like an unexpected injury? It depends on the specific situation.

Broken Tooth

If an injury results in a broken, chipped, or cracked tooth, the best thing to do is head straight to the dentist. If you can find the broken pieces, bring them along in a glass of cold milk to protect them. It’s also okay to rinse your mouth with water.

Even if a crack or chip seems minor, don’t ignore it! If the damage reaches the pulp chamber, it puts the tooth in serious danger of infection. Even if it doesn’t, it can work like a cavity and give bacteria a space to grow until it does reach the pulp chamber. That’s how dental infections start, leading to pulp death, painful abscesses, loss of bone tissue in the jaw, and even the risk of the infection spreading to the bloodstream.

Knocked-Out Adult Tooth

If the whole tooth gets knocked out in one piece, this, too, is a situation that requires immediate attention from an emergency dentist. There is a limited window (not much longer than an hour) in which a knocked-out tooth can be successfully replanted, so the faster you get to the dentist, the better its chances are. To give it its best shot, put it back in the socket on the way there and hold it in place with a washcloth or gauze. If that isn’t possible, store it in cold milk.

Here are a few important don’ts for knocked-out teeth:

  • DON’T touch the root.
  • DON’T let it dry out.
  • DON’T scrub or clean it with soap, alcohol, or peroxide.

Any of these could kill the root, making the tooth impossible to replant. The goal is to give the root its best chance of survival by handling it carefully, storing it properly, and getting to the emergency dentist as quickly as you can.

Knocked-Out Baby Tooth

Most of the time, when a baby tooth gets knocked out, it isn’t an emergency. Typically we wouldn’t replant a baby tooth because that might create problems for the permanent tooth underneath. However, if it wasn’t loose beforehand, we recommend at least giving the emergency dentist a call for some advice. There might be less obvious damage than what happened to the tooth.

We’re Prepared for Patient Emergencies Too!

Another essential part of your dental emergency plan, besides what to do in different emergency situations, is to know where to go for help! Check out this link to see where our practice is located or visit our business page here. If you’d like to learn about our practice’s emergency dental services, just give us a call and we can tell you about our end of the equation. Hopefully you’ll never need to make use of this information and the only times we’ll see you will be for normal appointments, but preparation is key!

Thank you for putting your trust in our practice!

Top image used under CC0 Public Domain license. Image cropped and modified from original.
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.

Your Tyler Dentist Tip: Teeth Aren’t Tools!

January 21, 2022

Filed under: Uncategorized — franklindentalteam @ 10:09 pm

dentist in tyler, TX

OUR TEETH CAN do a lot of things. They chew our food, they form a lot of the structure of our faces to make us look the way we do, they make it possible to speak clearly, and they’re the highlight of our smiles. These are good and healthy uses for teeth, but when we use them as tools for other jobs, we risk causing serious damage that will need extra trips to your dentist in Tyler, TX to fix.

Teeth Are Not Substitute Nail Clippers or Scissors

The damage a nail-biting habit can do is a topic worthy of its own blog post, but we’ll summarize it here. Our fingernails are the least sanitary parts of our hands because the area underneath them is essentially impossible to keep clean. Germs love to grow there, and those same germs transfer to our mouths when we bite our nails. Nail-biting also puts a lot of unnecessary wear and tear on the front teeth and may even shift them out of place.

Nails aren’t the only things we might be tempted to bite through; sometimes it might seem very convenient to use our teeth to cut a piece of tape. Unlike chewing food, the sawing motion we do to cut tape involves a lot of grinding, which is bad for our teeth’s surfaces. Some people do this with much worse materials than tape, such as wire. We hope all of our patients in Tyler will take the time to find the scissors or wire cutters instead of trying this!

Please Use an Actual Nutcracker (Unless You Want Extra Dentist Visits)

If you love eating walnuts, pecans, pistachios, or even half-popped popcorn kernels, don’t break them open with your teeth. Doing so is a great way to crack or chip a tooth, especially if that tooth has already undergone a dental procedure or if it has an untreated cavity. It’s much better to use a nutcracker.

Teeth Do Not Make Good Bottle Openers

Even though tooth enamel is the hardest substance in the human body, it’s far too brittle to be right for the job of popping a metal lid off a soda bottle. We could easily chip a tooth on that edge, and if we slip, that could mean a nasty gash to the lips or gums. No matter how cool you might think it will make you look to do it with your teeth, please use a real bottle opener.

Teeth Are Not a Third Hand

Sometimes when we’re in the middle of a busy task, we run out of hands to hold things, and it’s very easy to briefly stick a pencil, a few nails, or some sewing pins in our mouths for safekeeping.

Once again, the convenience isn’t worth the risks. Tripping or being hit with a sudden yawn, sneeze, cough, or hiccup could result in disaster. Even if nothing so dramatic happens, these objects can cause a lot of wear on teeth. For example, seamstresses have given themselves dents in their chewing surfaces from holding sewing pins in the same spot over and over. We don’t want our patients in Tyler to experience the same problem!

Your Tyler Dentist Says Only Use Your Teeth for Their Intended Purposes!

Cracking and fracturing are the third-highest cause of tooth loss, and you can significantly reduce your risk of needing an emergency dental visit and a series of expensive procedures by only using your teeth for what they’re for. Don’t forget to keep up with twice-daily brushing, daily flossing, and regular dental visits to your Tyler, TX dentist!

We love seeing our patients use their teeth for smiles!

Top image used under CC0 Public Domain license. Image cropped and modified from original.
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.

Preventive Dentistry and Your Next Checkup

December 15, 2021

Filed under: Uncategorized — franklindentalteam @ 9:40 pm

preventive dentistry preventative dentistry

GOING TO THE DENTIST for some basic preventive dentistry is something we should all be doing twice a year every year. If you’re in the Tyler, TX area and you’re already in the habit of coming in for regular cleanings, that’s wonderful! If not, here’s what you can expect from a typical cleaning appointment.

Your Check-Up Is Crucial for Preventive Dentistry

When visiting the dentist for a check-up, there are a few things that will typically happen. If you don’t have any existing dental concerns or conditions, the first step is usually dental X-rays. Your medical and dental history, your age, and your current oral health will determine how often you need these. Dental X-rays help dentists to find and diagnose tooth decay hiding between the teeth and other places hard to see with the naked eye. They also identify dental and orthodontic issues beneath the gums.

Next, the hygienist will begin cleaning the teeth. They use a small metal tool called a scaler to scrape away any tartar in between the teeth and around the gumline. Then they’ll polish the teeth using a lightly abrasive paste and a polishing tool. This gives your teeth a nice, deep clean and removes any remaining tartar. They finish the cleaning off with flossing.

Once the hygienist is done, it’s the dentist’s turn. They’ll review your X-rays, check your teeth and gums for signs of decay and gum disease, measure the depth of your gingival pockets, check for swelling and redness, test how well your teeth come together when you bite down, and examine your neck, lymph glands, and mouth for signs of oral cancer. When they finish, they’ll discuss treatment for any dental work you need and give you tips on improving your daily dental care routine.

Why Visiting The Dentist Is Important for Patients in Tyler

Even for people with great oral health habits like brushing twice a day for two minutes and flossing daily, the preventive dentistry step of visiting the dentist every six months is crucial to maintaining good oral health. The reason for this is that dental problems don’t go away on their own and tend to get worse, which also makes them more difficult (and expensive) to fix. Regular dental checkups catch problems early so that more intense treatment doesn’t become necessary.

We Can’t Wait To See You!

Whether it’s been six months or longer since the last time we saw you, we’re looking forward to seeing you again! Schedule your next appointment with us right away, and we can make sure everything in your mouth is healthy and clean! Make sure to check the map for directions before you head our way!

We have the world’s best patients!

Top image used under CC0 Public Domain license. Image cropped and modified from original.
The content on this blog is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.
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