Today, there is an enormous amount of information available to indicate that smoking has a harmful impact on your health. While you may not realize it, this also includes oral health. If you are concerned about oral cancer or other problems, then you may be surprised to find that eliminating smoking from your life will do more for you than just about any other kind of dental health protocol. At the very least, you should think about both the relatively minor, as well as the serious problems that you will be able to avoid.
Tooth Stains and Bad Breath
Have you ever gone on a date and felt like you had a good rapport, yet something felt wrong? If you smoke and the other person doesn’t, your breath is enough to turn them off before they even get to know you. Even though you can use teeth whitening agents to remove tobacco stains from your teeth, there is no hiding the smell of stale cigarette smoke from your breath. In fact, you may even find that trying to cover bad breath from smoking will make it seem even worse.
Smoking and Gum Disease
As you may be aware, cigarette smoke includes a number of chemicals. As these settle on your teeth and gums, they can cause all kinds of damage. Even if your gums are only affected slightly from cigarette smoke, it can still lead to long-term problems. This includes receding gums that will expose the roots to bacteria that will infect them and gum disease. Without question, if you hate costly dental treatments, then you may want to consider the role smoking plays in causing damage to your teeth.
Oral Cancer and Smoking
When you smoke cigarettes or use other tobacco products, there is always a chance that you will develop some type of oral cancer. Even though yearly exams can help you detect tumours, it is important to realize that this form of cancer spreads faster than many other kinds. Aside from growing fairly quickly, oral tumours can also get into the lymph system fairly quickly. Since these nodes happen to be in the neck, removing them tends to be much harder than in other parts of the body. Therefore, if you smoke and fail to pay attention to good oral care, you might wind up with a fairly extensive malignancy before it is even detected. At the same time, you may also find that your treatment options are more limited than you may have been expecting.
Here at Bite Dental Studios, we know that smoking has a negative impact on your dental health. While we cannot force you to stop smoking, we can still do our best to ensure that as little damage occurs to your teeth as possible. When you visit our office, you will receive personalised care, as well as answers to all of your vital questions about smoking and oral health.