First of all, having regular dental checkup is important because people feel pain. This might sound like an oxymoron, but a lot of people don’t realise that if you have an infection in a tooth, very often, a mild infection in the tooth or decay in the tooth, you won’t feel pain until that infection hits the nerve. Or they might have a lot of gum problems or they have gum disease, and when they brush their teeth, the gum bleeds, they think that they shouldn’t touch it anymore because it’s bleeding. What they don’t realise is that there’s a lot of infection that’s sitting in the gums or the teeth.

If it’s not cared for then one day, it’s going to blow up and you have one of the worst pains you could ever experience. So as contradictive as it sounds, coming to the dentist for a regular checkup ensures we can nip things in the bud and fix things before they blow up to be a big issue. This also means that your future dental visits will be a lot more comfortable, compared to waiting until you have a big abscess form before going to the dentist. Because when that happens, most likely you’ll have a less pleasant experience compared to coming to the dentist every six months.

The second reason why it’s important to have regular dental checkups is so that you don’t end up losing your teeth at a young age. Teeth are one of the things in our body that does not regenerate. So once it’s broken, once there is a big hole and it’s rotting, unless you get to the dentist and fix it on time, you will eventually lose these teeth. That’s going to have a tremendous impact on the health of your teeth, as well as your whole body. You know, a lot of people who don’t have teeth, they find that they can’t chew their food properly and enjoy their food and enjoy their lives, not to mention their speech and their confidence when they smile.

A lot of people don’t realise that if you have a dental infection, that can also transmit into other parts of the body and can be a big risk for cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and strokes. There is a very close correlation between dental health and your overall health. So by having your regular check-up, it is not just your teeth, but also your overall body healthy.

Reason number three is to save money. Once again, it might sound a bit contradictive, but that’s what I see with our patients every day. For those who dedicate themselves to go to the dentist twice a year for checkups and cleans, they tend to save more money in the long run.

Because if you keep your teeth healthy, then there’s less work needs to be done in the future.

For example, say you didn’t realise you have a small hole in one of your teeth, and you didn’t visit the dentist for five years, and that hole becomes so big overtime that the dentist has to take the tooth out. The cost to replace that tooth will be significantly more than if we picked it up when it was a still small hole and fixed it with a filling. I’m sure most people would prefer to have a filling rather than a dental implant.