Little known and serious health threat....

Today's Post: Friday, 9-24-2010

Little known and serious health threat we now know is much worse for you than was initially realized and can even kill you. More people have it than was once realized.

But, the good news is that we now know how to prevent it fat better than we once did. Best of all, preventing it is actually not that hard.

1. Here’s the bad news first.

Gum disease is this threat. Mild cases cause your gums to bleed when you brush your teeth—at that point a messy inconvenience.

But that’s deceptive because mild cases usually get worse.

And, bad and very bad cases of gum disease are easy to get if you don’t know how to prevent gum disease and do it.

The upfront problems with bad cases of gum disease are bad enough. They include industrial strength bad breath that mouthwash can’t cover up. They also cause your teeth to fall out if you fail to cure them. And, treating them after they are well developed can cost into the low thousands of dollars. So can paying up for false teeth; and worse, people who have false teeth also tend to have bad breath since germs tend to grow underneath them. And, if all you can afford is just a few hundred to pull the teeth that are about to fall out or you just let that happen, you begin to look horrible and often dramatically older than you would if you still had your teeth.

Unfortunately we found out that was the little problem with gum disease! People who have gum disease are much more likely to get heart disease and have a heart attack than people who don’t. That can kill you.

Earlier this week, I found out there is also evidence that having gum disease makes it more likely you’ll get type 2 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. The news story was titled: “Gum Disease Found To Be Significant Public Health Concern.”

Type 2 diabetes can be expensive and even health harming to treat. Worse, NOT treating it can cause nerve damage and phantom pain or numbness, blindness, foot amputation, and itself makes heart disease and heart attacks—including fatal ones—more likely.

Rheumatoid arthritis can make it so painful to move it ruins your quality of life and can even threaten your mobility. And, it often visibly deforms your joints besides.

Add up all those parts, and preventing gum disease can REALLY pay off saving you money, and helping to prevent and avoid all these: disease, pain, death, disfigurement, losing the ability to live on your own, making you ugly and smell bad, and ruin your quality of life.

2. But here’s the good news.

If you know how to floss your teeth and brush them in the ways that protect your gums, which is not that expensive to do – and you do it once a day every day, you prevent most gum disease.

If you also get your teeth cleaned at a dentist’s office and have him or her or their hygienist tell you if you are somehow missing any areas, you can come close to preventing all gum disease.

Further, if you also take 1,000 mg a day or more of vitamin C and 50 mg or more a day of the ubiquinol form of CoQ10 in addition to these first two things, it’s close to impossible to get gum disease.

And, if you have or ever get gum disease, you can cure it faster, cheaper, and more certainly if you do these three things.

3. But the most important of those 3 steps, brushing and flossing your teeth in the way that protects your gums and helps you keep your teeth, ONLY works if you know how to do them and do them correctly each time.

So, here are the steps.

First rinse your mouth with water. Then use a toothpick or Stimudent very carefully to remove stuff caught between your teeth if any is left over; and rinse your mouth again.

Second, floss both your upper and lower teeth. And at each place once you get the floss by the sticking point if any, floss twice once all the way to the gum and scraping the side of each tooth and then a second time on the side of the tooth on the other side of the gap between your teeth. (Just getting the floss by the sticking point will remove some food particles that didn’t rinse out; but the double action to clean tooth surface right down the gumline takes off an only partly visible film of germy gunk that will otherwise build up and cause gum disease.) I just learned this part myself.

Third, brush your teeth in four steps:
a) Put the toothpaste on and brush the biting surfaces or tops of the teeth on the top and bottom. If you use a fluoride toothpaste, that puts it right on the places that are most likely to need its protection from tooth decay.

The rest of the brushing is gum protection about 98%!

b) Brush AT the gumline at a 45% angle as if you are trying to push the gum away from your teeth. This does triple duty. It cleans the surface of your teeth at the gumline. It cleans the surface of your teeth just underneath that place on your gums. And, it increases the blood circulation in your gums and gives them some healthy stimulation and exercise. (Brushing at the gumline but NOT at that 45 degree angle to push the gum away is only about 5% as effective. I personally just learned that myself. And, if you’ve not been doing it yet, you can feel the difference!)

c) Do that 45 degree at the gumline brush a second time on top and on the bottom and do a bit extra anywhere your dentist or hygienist says you have been missing.

d) Brush above your gumline on both top and bottom & then rinse thoroughly with water. That too helps clean out just under the gumline and exercises and increases the blood circulation to your gums. And, it takes the process from about 95% effective to close to 100% effective. (That step I actually invented myself. And, my gums tested as healthier as soon as I began always doing this last step.)