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The Rising Popularity Of Cosmetic Dentistry

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The Rising Popularity Of Cosmetic Dentistry

Not everyone is born with a great set of pearly whites. What’s sad is that some kids will tolerate the condition of their teeth until they grow up because of the vast cost it entails. And because of this, their self-esteem, confidence, and mental health are severely affected. Not to mention, the condition of their teeth continues to worsen as they age.

Today, with technological advancements, even worse teeth conditions can be remedied by cosmetic dentistry. And the world’s perception of oral health has changed so much that people put more effort into making their smiles better by caring for their teeth.

Globally, the revenue for oral care amounted to USD$49.38 billion and is expected to grow annually by 5.06%.

What Is Cosmetic Dentistry?

Cosmetic Dentistry

Veneer installation procedure over central incisor. Medically accurate tooth 3D illustration

Cosmetic dentistry is professional oral care done by cosmetic dentists to improve the appearance of a patient’s mouth, gums, teeth, and overall smile. With this procedure, somebody living with low self-esteem due to the condition of their mouth and teeth can be more confident and conquer their dreams.

The procedure can be a minor fix or surgical, depending on the severity of the patient’s condition. The overall goal of the process is to give the patient a beautiful natural smile.

Who Needs Cosmetic Dentistry?

Anyone who wants to improve their smile can have a cosmetic dental procedure says this dentist in Charlotte NC. If you suffer from severe tooth decay, cracked teeth, discoloration, misshapen teeth, and missing teeth, you don’t have to let it affect your life negatively; you can do something about it.

Here are some of the procedures that cosmetic dentists can do:

  • Teeth Whitening

When your teeth become stained over the years by coffee, smoking, medications, and other habits, your teeth could become severely discolored. Although you can find whitening toothpaste on the market, their effectiveness only treats the surface of the teeth and will not address the root cause, which goes deeper than the surface.

Most of the time, the result of whitening toothpaste is just an optical illusion from its blue covarine content, the chemical that gives the teeth that temporary sparkly glow. This is why many opt for cosmetic tooth whitening since it goes beyond the surface and gives your teeth a more natural color.

  • Dental Crowns

Dental crowns, or dental caps, hides misshapen or severely decayed teeth and could also work as a protection to keep these teeth from breaking completely.

  • Dental Veneers

Dental veneers are custom-made porcelain or ceramic laid on the surface of the teeth that resemble the patient’s natural teeth. It can remedy many problems, including damaged enamel, crooked teeth, and decaying and discolored teeth.

  • Dental Implants

Dental implants are the more advanced solution to replace missing teeth. While dentures can give one a complete set of teeth, they may sometimes look unnatural. Dental implants will make the teeth locked into the jawbone, and you don’t need to take it out to clean it as you do with dentures.

  • Dental Bonding

This is another cosmetic dental procedure to address discolored, decayed, cracked, and misshapen teeth. Many people use this to close the gaps and spaces in their teeth and to make them look longer.

  • Inlays And Onlays

When a tooth has been damaged by decay, it can be restored by a dental filling. But a firmer method that extends over the cusps is today called inlay and onlay. The material can also be customized depending on the patient’s preference. Cosmetic dentists can use porcelain, composite, and gold.

What Are The Things You Need To Consider Before Getting One?

Cosmetic dental procedures can be permanent, and some of their outcomes last a decade to 20 years. So, if you’re thinking of getting one, you need to be very sure as you want to get it done perfectly right the first time.

  • The Experience And Expertise Of The Cosmetic Dentist

You need to do a background check and preferably seek the help of one with more than a decade of experience.

  • If The Clinic Offers A Digital Smile Design

When availing a cosmetic dental procedure, the dentist must prioritize the overall look of the face while smiling, not just the teeth. This can be done through a technology called digital smile design.

  • 3D Scanning Of The Teeth

The clinic must have 3D scanning to design the teeth properly.

  • They Have Excellent Ceramists

The dentist’s work wouldn’t be successful without the contribution of a superb ceramist. The ceramist is the artist behind the beautiful, radiant smile you will have.

  • The Trial Smile

Before laying on the dental appliance, you need to have a trial smile done to ensure that it fits you perfectly and it’s very comfortable in your mouth.

  • The Warranty

Since cosmetic dental procedures can be pretty costly, you need to know if the clinic offers a warranty to ensure that just in case something unfortunate happens, they can fix it for you. The warranty for cosmetic dental procedures varies depending on what you have chosen. Most clinics offer a two-year warranty for crowns, veneers, and bridges. For dental implants much longer at five years. But this would depend on how you handle your oral health and hygiene for the duration. If you neglect your dentist’s reminders, your warranty might get void.

Conclusion

Taking care of your oral health entails more than just brushing and flossing. Your smile is your number one weapon to charm people. And if you’re not confident and hide your smile all the time, this could hold you back from doing the things you love.

You must be confident to face others and show them that you can conquer anything. And with a bright, radiant smile, you might be able to do that.

Health

Older patients, non-English speakers more likely to be harmed in hospital: report

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Patients who are older, don’t speak English, and don’t have a high school education are more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay in Canada, according to new research.

The Canadian Institute for Health Information measured preventableharmful events from 2023 to 2024, such as bed sores and medication errors,experienced by patients who received acute care in hospital.

The research published Thursday shows patients who don’t speak English or French are 30 per cent more likely to experience harm. Patients without a high school education are 20 per cent more likely to endure harm compared to those with higher education levels.

The report also found that patients 85 and older are five times more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay compared to those under 20.

“The goal of this report is to get folks thinking about equity as being a key dimension of the patient safety effort within a hospital,” says Dana Riley, an author of the report and a program lead on CIHI’s population health team.

When a health-care provider and a patient don’t speak the same language, that can result in the administration of a wrong test or procedure, research shows. Similarly, Riley says a lower level of education is associated with a lower level of health literacy, which can result in increased vulnerability to communication errors.

“It’s fairly costly to the patient and it’s costly to the system,” says Riley, noting the average hospital stay for a patient who experiences harm is four times more expensive than the cost of a hospital stay without a harmful event – $42,558 compared to $9,072.

“I think there are a variety of different reasons why we might start to think about patient safety, think about equity, as key interconnected dimensions of health-care quality,” says Riley.

The analysis doesn’t include data on racialized patients because Riley says pan-Canadian data was not available for their research. Data from Quebec and some mental health patients was also excluded due to differences in data collection.

Efforts to reduce patient injuries at one Ontario hospital network appears to have resulted in less harm. Patient falls at Mackenzie Health causing injury are down 40 per cent, pressure injuries have decreased 51 per cent, and central line-associated bloodstream infections, such as IV therapy, have been reduced 34 per cent.

The hospital created a “zero harm” plan in 2019 to reduce errors after a hospital survey revealed low safety scores. They integrated principles used in aviation and nuclear industries, which prioritize safety in complex high-risk environments.

“The premise is first driven by a cultural shift where people feel comfortable actually calling out these events,” says Mackenzie Health President and Chief Executive Officer Altaf Stationwala.

They introduced harm reduction training and daily meetings to discuss risks in the hospital. Mackenzie partnered with virtual interpreters that speak 240 languages and understand medical jargon. Geriatric care nurses serve the nearly 70 per cent of patients over the age of 75, and staff are encouraged to communicate as frequently as possible, and in plain language, says Stationwala.

“What we do in health care is we take control away from patients and families, and what we know is we need to empower patients and families and that ultimately results in better health care.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.

Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Alberta to launch new primary care agency by next month in health overhaul

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CALGARY – Alberta’s health minister says a new agency responsible for primary health care should be up and running by next month.

Adriana LaGrange says Primary Care Alberta will work to improve Albertans’ access to primary care providers like family doctors or nurse practitioners, create new models of primary care and increase access to after-hours care through virtual means.

Her announcement comes as the provincial government continues to divide Alberta Health Services into four new agencies.

LaGrange says Alberta Health Services hasn’t been able to focus on primary health care, and has been missing system oversight.

The Alberta government’s dismantling of the health agency is expected to include two more organizations responsible for hospital care and continuing care.

Another new agency, Recovery Alberta, recently took over the mental health and addictions portfolio of Alberta Health Services.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 15, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Experts urge streamlined, more compassionate miscarriage care in Canada

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Rana Van Tuyl was about 12 weeks pregnant when she got devastating news at her ultrasound appointment in December 2020.

Her fetus’s heartbeat had stopped.

“We were both shattered,” says Van Tuyl, who lives in Nanaimo, B.C., with her partner. Her doctor said she could surgically or medically pass the pregnancy and she chose the medical option, a combination of two drugs taken at home.

“That was the last I heard from our maternity physician, with no further followup,” she says.

But complications followed. She bled for a month and required a surgical procedure to remove pregnancy tissue her body had retained.

Looking back, Van Tuyl says she wishes she had followup care and mental health support as the couple grieved.

Her story is not an anomaly. Miscarriages affect one in five pregnancies in Canada, yet there is often a disconnect between the medical view of early pregnancy loss as something that is easily managed and the reality of the patients’ own traumatizing experiences, according to a paper published Tuesday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

An accompanying editorial says it’s time to invest in early pregnancy assessment clinics that can provide proper care during and after a miscarriage, which can have devastating effects.

The editorial and a review of medical literature on early pregnancy loss say patients seeking help in emergency departments often receive “suboptimal” care. Non-critical miscarriage cases drop to the bottom of the triage list, resulting in longer wait times that make patients feel like they are “wasting” health-care providers’ time. Many of those patients are discharged without a followup plan, the editorial says.

But not all miscarriages need to be treated in the emergency room, says Dr. Modupe Tunde-Byass, one of the authors of the literature review and an obstetrician/gynecologist at Toronto’s North York General Hospital.

She says patients should be referred to early pregnancy assessment clinics, which provide compassionate care that accounts for the psychological impact of pregnancy loss – including grief, guilt, anxiety and post-traumatic stress.

But while North York General Hospital and a patchwork of other health-care providers in the country have clinics dedicated to miscarriage care, Tunde-Byass says that’s not widely adopted – and it should be.

She’s been thinking about this gap in the Canadian health-care system for a long time, ever since her medical training almost four decades ago in the United Kingdom, where she says early pregnancy assessment centres are common.

“One of the things that we did at North York was to have a clinic to provide care for our patients, and also to try to bridge that gap,” says Tunde-Byass.

Provincial agency Health Quality Ontario acknowledged in 2019 the need for these services in a list of ways to better manage early pregnancy complications and loss.

“Five years on, little if any progress has been made toward achieving this goal,” Dr. Catherine Varner, an emergency physician, wrote in the CMAJ editorial. “Early pregnancy assessment services remain a pipe dream for many, especially in rural Canada.”

The quality standard released in Ontario did, however, prompt a registered nurse to apply for funding to open an early pregnancy assessment clinic at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton in 2021.

Jessica Desjardins says that after taking patient referrals from the hospital’s emergency room, the team quickly realized that they would need a bigger space and more people to provide care. The clinic now operates five days a week.

“We’ve been often hearing from our patients that early pregnancy loss and experiencing early pregnancy complications is a really confusing, overwhelming, isolating time for them, and (it) often felt really difficult to know where to go for care and where to get comprehensive, well-rounded care,” she says.

At the Hamilton clinic, Desjardins says patients are brought into a quiet area to talk and make decisions with providers – “not only (from) a physical perspective, but also keeping in mind the psychosocial piece that comes along with loss and the grief that’s a piece of that.”

Ashley Hilliard says attending an early pregnancy assessment clinic at The Ottawa Hospital was the “best case scenario” after the worst case scenario.

In 2020, she was about eight weeks pregnant when her fetus died and she hemorrhaged after taking medication to pass the pregnancy at home.

Shortly after Hilliard was rushed to the emergency room, she was assigned an OB-GYN at an early pregnancy assessment clinic who directed and monitored her care, calling her with blood test results and sending her for ultrasounds when bleeding and cramping persisted.

“That was super helpful to have somebody to go through just that, somebody who does this all the time,” says Hilliard.

“It was really validating.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 15, 2024.

Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.

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