Brushing your teeth and flossing sometimes just isn’t enough to completely clean the teeth of tartar. Professional teeth cleaning, an oral hygiene practice, involves removing plaque from your teeth to prevent cavities, gingivitis, and other periodontal diseases.
Professional teeth cleaning is the most reliable way of thoroughly cleaning the teeth and preventing oral health issues and gum diseases. Dentists are equipped with tools that are needed to remove plaque and prevent the buildup of tartar on the tooth surface that normal tooth brushing and flossing may not prevent or remove.
Let’s explore some of the tools and instruments that dentists use for professional teeth cleaning.
Ultrasonic
Depending on the amount of plaque accumulated on your teeth, the dentist you use a tool called an Ultrasonic. Ultrasonics are special instruments that vibrate at a high rate of speed to break up and remove buildup from a tooth.
Hand tools
Even after using an ultrasonic, fine remnants of plaque or tartar often need to be addressed with the use of hand tools and scrapers. Once the Ultrasonic has loosed the tartar buildup, small hand tools will be used to scrape off remaining buildup and smoothen the surface of your teeth before polishing.
Electric tooth polisher
An electric tooth polisher is an important tool in teeth cleaning. Once your teeth have been cleared of plaque and tartar, you want to shine them up nicely. An electric tooth polisher first has gritty paste applied to it. That paste is then massaged into your teeth by turning the polisher on. Nice and smooth teeth are revealed after a good polishing.
Saliva ejector
With all of the scraping and polishing, the dentist uses a saliva ejector to remove remnants of the cleaning process as well as built up saliva from the patient.
Fluoride
This is the finishing touch of a professional teeth cleaning procedure. Fluoride is applied gently to your teeth to strengthen the enamel of the teeth and to help prevent tooth decay.