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Comfortably Numb with Novocaine
A Discussion About a Common Anesthetic As mentioned in a previous article, most dental patients feel some level of anxiety during their visit. One of the reasons for that anxiety is expected discomfort during a procedure. Whether that pain actually materializes or...
Coping with Dental Anxiety
A recent study indicates that six out of ten American adults are too scared to go to the dentist. That's more than the reported fear of visiting surgeons and neurologists combined! Whether they call it fear, anxiety, morbid terror, or give it an official term like...
An Unexpected Benefit
Routine Dental Cleaning Discovers Potentially Fatal Disease A proper routine in oral hygiene is vital! Brushing for two minutes, twice a day, supplemented with flossing and mouthwash, keeps your teeth strong and your mouth healthy by preventing cavities and gum...
Oral Health in Spring
Spring is such a glorious time in Placerville! The sun shines, birds chirp, leaves and green grass return, and flowers bloom. Along with these pleasant springtime renewals, many people do spring cleaning or other tasks to prepare for the coming months of activity....
Make the Most of Your Dental Visits
Don't Let Fear Keep You Away! Ever since moving pictures became popular, dental visits have been a common target for comics and screenwriters. Dental scenes have even been in scary movies (lookup Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man for an example). Over time, influences...
Yellow Teeth and Oral Health
Making teeth whiter is a big industry today! Aside from other dental products and services, people spend billions of dollars annually trying to get a pearly white smile. One of the main reasons people whiten their teeth is because they feel it “looks better than...
The Best Part of the Fifth Food Group?
In the month of February, billions of dollars are spent on a single food all around the world. The same thing happens in the United States during October. We eat this food by itself, offer it as a flavor choice, or use it as a garnish. We mix it with some foods,...
Just Keep Swishing
Although making a “swish” in basketball might show a high level of skill or talent, sometimes it’s not much more than a fortunate throw. However, someone making a swish in their oral hygiene routine shows a high level of personal commitment to health and success every...
What Dentists Do for Sleep Apnea
The Comfortable Way to Stop Snoring Is there a motorbike in the room? Is someone sawing logs? Snoring is an agitating sound. You seldom hear your own snoring, but you certainly hear others doing it when you try to fall asleep! This understandably causes frustration...
Don’t Fear Fillings
For more than a century, millions of individuals have used amalgam fillings to protect themselves from tooth decay. Amalgam silver is a tough, rigid, long-lasting material that dentists use to fill cavities. Usually, amalgam includes mercury, silver, tin and copper....
Just Spitting It Out
The Wonderful World of Saliva When you hear the phrase “spit it out,” it usually means, “Get to the point!” At the Placerville Dental Group, when we use the phrase, we usually mean it literally (not to mention more respectfully). Sometimes, we want to get a sample of...
Mouthguards and Cavities
When playing sports, sleeping, or straightening your teeth, mouthguards perform an invaluable task of supporting and protecting your teeth. Sporting mouthguards offer protection during physical activities. Bite guards protect your teeth from grinding or clenching...
The Binky or the Thumb
Seeing an ultrasound image of a fetus sucking its thumb is amazing. If a patient visits our Placerville office and brings in their infant, dozing away in a stroller while it sucks on a pacifier, it’s simply too adorable for us not to smile and say: “Awwww!” And when...
Does Gum Recession Affect You?
Don’t Play Around with Receding Gums Back when we were in elementary school, “recess” was a word we all appreciated! Now that we are older, it’s not such a nice word anymore — as in economic recession, hairline recession, and gum recession. For our dentists, gum...
Dental Implants and Travel
When you take an airline flight, you go through a security checkpoint. Along with frowning agents, x-ray machines, and waiting lines comparable to the DMV, one inevitable part of this procedure is the intimidating rectangle everyone walks through — the metal detector....