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

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

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