3 Tips For Caring For Your New Dental Crown
Often, a crown will be placed over the top of your tooth if it has previously received a root canal, if it is has been mostly broken off, or if it has so many fillings that only a small portion of the actual tooth is remaining. Crowns are made from porcelain and look almost exactly like the rest of your teeth. However, when it comes to caring for your crown you will want to be a bit more careful with it, than you need to be with the rest of your teeth. This article will discuss 3 excellent tips for caring for your new dental crown.
Floss Carefully
When you are flossing around your crown, you want to make sure that you use extra caution. You will need to make sure that you floss every angle of the tooth to remove all food stuck around or underneath it. Since food that is caught between your gums and crown can cause an infection in your gums, you will obviously want to avoid this entirely if possible. You can use a special floss threader if the space between your crown and the teeth surrounding is small because this will help you to ensure that you don't break the floss in between your teeth.
Avoid Certain Foods
Since the crown isn't an actual tooth, it has the ability to be pulled off. While the glue on the tooth is incredibly strong, there are certain foods that you should avoid to lessen the possibility of accidentally removing or breaking the crown. Sticky foods—such as taffy, caramel, and gum—can pull on your crown and could potentially remove it. Also, foods that are especially hard, such as ice, hard candies, and popcorn kernels have the potential to break your crown. Foods that are hard can crack the porcelain of your crown because they are so hard, but ice is especially dangerous because the cold temperature mixed with the hardness of the ice can make your crown even more susceptible to breaking.
Use Fluoride Rinse
With a crown, the only portion of your real tooth that you have left is your root. Since you don't want this root to decay anymore into your gums, you are going to need to do your best to take care of it. One way that you can help to stop your root from decaying is to use a fluoride rinse in your mouth each day. This fluoride rinse will help to protect the root of your tooth and will lessen your chances of getting gum disease.
For more information, contact offices like Sunshine Dentistry.
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