Oral care & the dentist. Not a very exciting or thrilling subject to think about and prep for, is it? Perhaps not, but one thing’s for certain. The last thing you want in a grid-down disaster situation is to have a tooth go bad and incapacitate you.
SO… here we are, let’s start thinking about oral care (teeth, gums, the whole shooting match). As usual, the disclaimer: I am not a doctor or a dentist, nor do I pretend to be one on the internet. For all dental & medical care, please consult your dentist and doctor as soon as possible.
The basics of oral care
Since everybody reading this is probably six-years-old or order (although we are G rated and perfectly safe for any age to read, there aren’t a lot of 4-year-old preppers even in our Preppermed 101 series, we’ve all been exposed to the proper way to take care of teeth and gums.
But here’s the kicker – A lot of folks just don’t do it, or don’t do it right.
SO… here’s the rules (from the American Dental Association)
- Brush your teeth twice a day with a soft-bristled brush. The size and shape of your brush should fit your mouth allowing you to reach all areas easily.
- Replace your toothbrush every three or four months, or sooner if the bristles are frayed. A worn toothbrush won’t do a good job of cleaning your teeth.
- Make sure to use an ADA-accepted fluoride toothpaste.
The proper brushing technique is to:
- Place your toothbrush at a 45-degree angle to the gums.
- Gently move the brush back and forth in short (tooth-wide) strokes.
- Brush the outer surfaces, the inner surfaces, and the chewing surfaces of the teeth.
- To clean the inside surfaces of the front teeth, tilt the brush vertically and make several up-and-down strokes.
And here’s a video in case the rules are difficult to follow
Get clean, stay clean
In addition to brushing and flossing (and yeah, Salty is not good at always flossing… Spice, however, gets a red star on her folder from the tooth fairy), it’s important to get regular cleanings from your dentist’s office.
I admit it, I went through a bad set of years where I swore off the dentist (I did still do self-care) and I ended up paying for it dearly with about a zillion fillings.
For two years, my life looked like this about once a month:
Salty’s actual dentist… seriously, I took the picture in the chair…
After I came to my senses (i.e. grew up, manned up) I got myself fixed up and since then I’ve been very, very regular in my dentist office visits.
There’s more to oral care than just “my tooth hurts”
Good dental hygiene and care can save your life. Literally.
A strange but little-known truth is that gum infections are directly associated with heart disease.
To explain this, I’m going to turn it over to our resident pathophysiologist, Spice…
Spice spills the beans on the gum infection/heart disease situation
When you neglect oral care, the bacteria (there are always a bunch living in the mouth, and that’s ok) start to build themselves little condominiums on the surface of your teeth. These bacterial condos are called plaque.
Many kinds of bacteria can live in the mouth. Some are harmless or even helpful, some harmful. Plaque is a great place for the harmful species to live, so they get more abundant. These unpleasant species of bacteria start releasing acid to erode the teeth (they’re excavating a basement for themselves).
The immune system notices them and their damage and inflammation ensues. That’s the gum disease. Gum disease is, therefore, a kind of chronic inflammation that leaks inflammatory molecules into the bloodstream.
Inflammatory molecules in the bloodstream cause the inner linings of the blood vessels to get inflamed. This vascular inflammation promotes a bunch of nasty disease processes, most notably atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is when lipid based gunk builds up on the inside of your arteries. When this gunk builds up on the inside of the arteries that feed blood to the heart muscle, it can cause heart attacks. (In the brain arteries, it causes strokes and promotes Alzheimer’s disease.) Atherosclerosis is not good.
So, not flossing seriously does increase your risk of a heart attack. I couldn’t make this stuff up.
https://www.dentistryiq.com/articles/2017/02/the-surprising-link-between-periodontal-disease-and-heart-health-what-dental-professionals-need-to-know.html
What do you do when there is no dentist available?
Fortunately, there’s a great resource available to everybody, the book Where There Is No Dentist.
I encourage everybody to buy a hardback copy and keep it in your prepper library. The book is also/additionally available as a free PDF download from the publisher, available by clicking on this link.
Recommended Dental First Aid / Prep Kit
Here at 3BY, we encorage people to prep for the most likely emergency situations to happen first and formost, and when it comes to the need for dental first aid, our most likely scenario is a broken cap/lost filling/cracked tooth that causes extreme dental pain at a time we can’t reach a dentist. It may be night, or the weekend, or the fact that we are in the wilderness.
What we need to do is be ready to deal with this situation, and therefore we need a dental first aid kit.
A good dental first aid kit will contain (at minimum) several items.
- Medical-Grade exam gloves
- A high-quality dental mirror
- Light (headband works best)
- Temporary filling material / crown material
- Crown cement
- Dental Wax
- Toothbrush / toothpaste / floss
- High quality metal tweezers
- Sterile Gauze
- Tea bags (for control of bleeding… place a wet tea bag on the bleeding area and compress… seriously, this works well).
- Hydrogen peroxide
- Clove oil (used to reduce pain & swelling in dental pulp)
- Oral pain reliever jell
One of the key components that something you are likely to have otherwise in your first aid kit is the temporary filling material.
Here’s how one type of that material is applied:
Look for more dental information here on 3BY in the future. Until then, brush, floss and keep that appointment with the dentist.