Dr Adel Zakhary

  Most people tend think their teeth are perfect, but once they do decide to visit their dentist, their resolve is shaken. How can your dentist tell if the tooth has a cavity? The dentist examines their teeth and at once they begin to tell that something is wrong if the whole examination took a little while longer to the normal checkup, or if the dentist starts to bring in things off the table, and starts to ask the familiar question: “Does it hurt?”. Many times in our clinic, I have seen reactions from our patients ranging from a stunned gaze all the way to “no, Doc, you are wrong, my teeth are perfect”, and the final result is usually baffling. Telltale signs what if you as a person could look at your own teeth. Can you see any of these features? chipping (little cracks running on the tooth) mamelons (the little knobs that most people have at the edges of their front teeth) white lines or dark lines on the back teeth broken front tooth yellow white spots under the surface yellow...

Braces.. the food magnet. That pretty much sums up the article. Just kidding! Actually, its a little more complicated than that, but we will see to it that you grasp why the practice of regular brushing needs to be enforced, why cleaning is important with braces, and why not cleaning your teeth can hurt your cosmetics on the long run. Like any rough object, it catches stuff.  Because braces are rice grain sized, its very difficult to clean them. A brace is composed of brackets that are attached to the teeth (or glued on, if you will), and wires that connects these brackets in unison. When the bracket is attached to the tooth, the back of the bracket has these sharp objects called (hooks), and wings. It is probably what grazed your lips, or hurt your cheeks  if you never had braces on before. Now when you think about that rice-grain sized object, think about how easy is it for food to get stuck to it.  The rough edges collect the food over time, and the food starts to buil...