A dental visit involves both a dental exam and professional teeth cleaning. During the dental exam, you can expect:

• Inspection of your teeth, gums, jaw, and mouth: Dr. Thanga will examine all tooth surfaces to check for decay, cracks, and other signs of dental problems. He will also check your gums and the surrounding soft and hard tissues for inflammation, redness, and other signs of gum disease.
• Diagnostic x-rays: These help to detect any decay, cysts, tumors, broken jaw bone, or bone loss underneath the gums.
• Oral cancer screening: Dr. Thanga will check your gums, throat, lips, tongue, neck, face, and other tissues for benign tumors, lumps, and other signs of oral cancer.

After your dental exam, your dentist will clean your teeth using special dental instruments to remove plaque and tartar on the surface of your teeth and below the gum line. This is important to reduce harmful bacteria in your mouth that may lead to gum disease, decay, bad breath, and other dental and general health problems. He will also polish your teeth to remove stains.

Polishing the teeth, during professional teeth cleaning, removes the pellicle or skin of the teeth, though it reappears after 3 days. Plaque tends to stick to the pellicle, which means that it begins to build up again less than one week after your dental cleaning. And in a couple of weeks, tartar will have started to form on your teeth.

The rate at which plaque and tartar build up is largely dependent on the quality of your at-home dental care routine. Proper and regular brushing and flossing can slow down plaque buildup, which in turn helps to prevent gum disease. If you have gum disease, your dentist may recommend that you get dental cleanings every month for the fast 3- 6 months depending on the severity of the infection and your dedication to home care. With good management of gum disease, he may extend the cleaning appointments to 3, 4, 5, or 6 month intervals.

Final Note

Your dental professional is the best person to determine this. But for optimal dental health, you must also endeavor to take care of your teeth and gums in between visits.