In athletics, there are a couple sports that are very prone to orophacial trauma. Wearing a mouth guard. One of my colleagues had an experience that her father made her wear a mouth guard.
She’s a dentist now, but she hated the mouth guard and never understood why she had to go through the embarrassment of wearing it. After doing her education, understands and swears she will have her own children do that if she ever has them in sports. It’s another preventative management technique that we would recommend for our athletes, especially those that deal with or impact sports or anything that could lead to impact.
Like if they use basketballs, baseballs, etc. Any other equipment that can come in direct contact or close to their face. We want patients to have a good experience with what it means to go to the dentist.
So if we can avoid a trauma, that is the best solution. For night guards or using a mouth guard to help with grinding stresses in everyday, it’s just a new reality and it’s it’s a big weight on us in modern society. Making sure that we’re protecting what we’ve got is key when it comes to mouth guards.
Whether it’s at night, whether it’s at sports, we want to make sure that we’re not grinding our teeth away, that we’re not breaking them down. Again, early detection in our exams, making sure that we see signs of grinding so that we don’t wait until a patient chips off a whole tooth or does something like that where now we’re talking about something expensive like an implant or the extraction in the first place. Which is, I always tell my patients, more of an emotional experience than a painful one, especially if we manage pain well.
It’s scary. So it’s about avoiding having to hit those bigger procedures, those more invasive, more traumatic, more emotional, just charged experiences that are better avoided if we can catch them early.