The new year can be a new beginning, which gives you an opportunity to make a change in your life for the better. Dental implants can also give you a new beginning, in more ways than one. You’ll be able to eat, talk and laugh in a way you haven’t for a very long time, but you’ll also have to learn to care for your dental implants properly.
If you’ve just gotten dental implants recently, a good new year’s resolution would be to learn to floss around them. Here’s a guide on how to do that.
Learn How to Floss Properly
The first step in keeping up a flossing habit is to learn how to do it correctly, which is especially important for dental implant patients. Your natural teeth are connected to your gum line by a natural ligament. When you floss below the gum ridge, you do technically risk breaking this ligament, but the nerves that are in the gums will let you know before that becomes a serious risk.
Dental implants, on the other hand, have no nerve endings. If you floss below the gum ridge with your dental implants, you could potentially break the seal that connects them to the gums without realizing it.
If you have dental implants, you can floss them normally, except that you shouldn’t press down too hard or floss below the gum ridge.
Use Other Tools
If flossing your dental implants is difficult at first, it will naturally get easier with time. That said, people with dexterity issues might struggle to floss without pressing below the gum ridge. If that’s you, you might want to look into other ways to clean between your teeth.
Floss threaders can make the work of using dental floss a bit easier, and oral irrigators use water to eliminate the need for floss.
Remember Flossing’s Importance
The best way to stay motivated is to remember why you committed to dental hygiene in the first place. Flossing is absolutely the best way to remove plaque buildup from between the teeth, which is essential to preventing gum disease. In the worst case, gum disease can infiltrate beneath the gums, seeping into the bone layer. That can lead to bone loss, putting the integrity of your implant at risk.
Keep these tips in mind, and you should be able to keep your implant clean well into the new year. Do that, and it should stay strong for decades to come.
About Our Practice
At Northern Virginia Oral, Maxillofacial, & Implant Surgery, we don’t stop at offering our patients exceptional dental care; we go the extra mile to ensure that our patients are in complete comfort while we do. We have five top-notch oral surgeons on staff, which means that we’re able to offer any kind of procedure you could need.
If you have any questions about caring for dental implants, we can be reached at our website. You can also call our Alexandria, VA office at (571) 777-6501.