In our life, it is important to live for a long time. But to live a healthy life is more important. There are many ways to keep health. Some people focus on exercise, diet and periodic medical checkup for health. However, there is a method that is not considered important but can be very effective if we try doing continuously. That method is to keep oral hygiene. Oral hygiene means to keep clean teeth, tongue and gums by using tooth brush, dental floss, tongue cleaner and gargle solution. It simply begins with brushing teeth and scaling and goes up to treatment at dental clinic. The reasons include improving one’s confidence, maintaining one’s health and saving time and money.
The first advantages of keeping oral hygiene is to improve one’s confidence. When somenone meets other person, they have a conversation within a close distance and we can see one’s face cleary. If someone have dark-colored teeth, some missing teeth, red gums and bad breath, almost every person don’t have any good feeling during conversation. Wrong and careless brushing teeth can cause tooth decay and periodontitis, so these make dark colored teeth and red gums due to inflammation of gums. Periodontitis cause loosing teeth also. Bad breath is also made by not cleaning tongue and oral mucosa. Because there are many spaces in our mouth for hiding and growing of microbes which make byproducts causing not only periodontitis, cavities but also bad breath. Debris of food help bad breath be more serious.
The second advantages of keeping oral hygiene is to maintain one’s health. Clean mouth gives us prevention of minor disease such as cold. Many germs that come into our mouth can cause cold. We can reduce the number of germs and chance to catch cold by brushing teeth and rinsing mouth. Cold makes our body weaker and vulnerable to other disease. Healthy oral condition has no limitation in taking food, especially hard ones like vegetables, fruits and meat. No teeth or mobile teeth cannot perform their chewing function properly. Oral hygiene can prevent dental pain. Dental pain is known as the most serious pain that cannot be endured. Advanced dental cavities and gum inflammation make severe dental pain. Prevention of oral disease reduces chance to be suffered from serious pain.
The third advantage of keeping oral hygiene is to save time, money, and effort. Dental treatments need from one to several visits of dental clinic. Preventive treatment ends up in one visit but periodontal or dental pulp treatment requires several visits. If we keep clean our mouth, preventive treatment can be the only treatment in dental clinic. Usually dental treatments are high cost. Even though simple treatment costs several ten dollars, many complex treatments cost more than several thousand dollars. Keeping oral hygiene can decrease the degree of self-oral care. In other words, the worse oral condition, the more intensive and several home cares are needed. Someone that has advanced oral disease must make more brushing teeth, more flossing, more dental checking and more interests.
Most people think that keeping oral hygiene continuously is nothing and not seriously. The one thing that we must know is oral disease including cavities, periodontitis, and mucosal inflammation progress chronically and step by step but from some bad situation it goes faster and more seriously. Only if we assign just 15 minutes a day to clean our mouth, we can improve our self confidence, get advantages in maintaining our health and save our valuable time and money.
