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Baby Boomers & Dental Care — Don’t wait until after retirement!

By on May 20, 2009 in Bonding, Cavities, Cosmetic dentistry, Family dentistry, Old silver fillings, Porcelain Crowns

With more and more Baby Boomers approach­ing or enter­ing retire­ment, an issue often not con­sid­ered is their den­tal health. I think it is actu­ally an impor­tant topic to dis­cuss, even more so in today’s economy.
Many Baby Boomers — my par­ents included — have put retire­ment on hold, but it’s still not all that far away, and with retire­ment usu­ally comes the loss of den­tal insur­ance and the loss of medical/dental Flex plans that can help a lot with cov­er­ing the cost of den­tal care. After that, it’s all out-of-pocket. Ouch! So we always rec­om­mend a thor­ough re-evaluation of exist­ing den­tal work for things that may be on the verge of going bad. Such things could be:

  • Old sil­ver fill­ings with cav­i­ties and cracks that could turn into root canals and crowns or extractions

  • The teeth around the old sil­ver fill­ings may have cracks that could lead to bro­ken teeth

  • Gum (peri­odon­tal) disease

  • Ugly old crowns that could be replaced for a nicer smile in the golden years

  • Replac­ing miss­ing teeth with den­tal bridges or implants so you can eat the foods you want

  • Etc etc etc.…..

This gen­tle­man hadn’t been to the den­tist in a num­ber of years but knew that he was approach­ing retire­ment, so he wanted to come in, get a clean­ing, and find out if he needed to take care of any­thing while he still had den­tal insur­ance. Turns out that many of his 30+ year old sil­ver fill­ings were in really bad con­di­tion, with pieces chip­ping off, cav­i­ties form­ing around the edges, teeth crack­ing, and gum dis­ease to boot.

While the total treat­ment that he needed involved some gum surgery (not needed for every­one, obvi­ously), the pri­mary issue that we addressed was to clean out the old fill­ings and cav­i­ties, then rebuild the teeth with all-porcelain crowns on sev­eral teeth, 1 tooth got a tooth-colored fill­ing, and 1 tooth got a gold 3/4 crown (most of the tooth, but not the whole tooth is cov­ered by the crown).

He can now rest assured that all of the prob­lems with these teeth are fixed, and it’s likely he will not need any of them ever worked on again as long as he takes good care of them.

Broken silver fillings with cavities, fixed with porcelain dental crowns, a gold dental crown

Comments (1)

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  1. dentists lake forest says:
    September 14, 2010 at 5:41 am

    I think it’s never really too late to make some cor­rec­tive mea­sures on our teeth. But, like what this post says, it’s bet­ter to have our teeth always checked while we still have our den­tal insur­ance, and the time to visit our den­tist. Lake For­est, IL (where I live) have den­tists who never fails to advo­cate over­all den­tal health.

    Luck­ily, our den­tists (Lake For­est, IL) caters to the den­tal con­cerns of peo­ple regard­less of age. And that’s a good thing.

    Reply

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