June 5, 2008
Dentistry & Diabetes: The First Thing Your Dentist Should Do
As a person who has diabetes, you need expert dental care to prevent, treat and even reverse gum disease. If it’s allowed to progress, gum disease can make your diabetes symptoms worse and trigger a cascade of potentially catastrophic health effects.
The first thing your dentist should do is to be aware of your diabetes. At each visit, your dentist should spend some time discussing how you are managing it and the level of control you have with your metabolic status. Your dentist should be ready and willing to talk frankly with you about all phases of your diabetes care.
If your dentist doesn’t ask about diabetes, you need to initiate this discussion, talking very directly with your dentist and telling him or her about your diabetes in detail. Your dentist needs to know what your current condition is, how your diabetes is treated and how you are doing at controlling your diabetes.
Be honest. Your dentist needs to know how diet, insulin and exercise are figured into your efforts to manage your diabetes. This is not about judging you and your efforts to control your diabetes; it’s about helping you to achieve better dental health, which in turn may help you get to better diabetes management.
There are five other things your dentist should do to help you prevent gum disease or to treat it if it’s already present. We’ll discuss these over the next several blogs.
Find out how a simple visit to the right dentist could help with your diabetes. For more diabetes information, get your free five-lesson mini-course on diabetes and your teeth at DentistryForDiabetics.com.
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