Patients Regret Putting Off Treatment
With the hustle and bustle of daily life, it can feel extremely difficult to find the time for a dental visit. Some patients wait for their next bi-annual check-up before they discuss recent pains, while others just avoid the dentist entirely. In all cases, patients who see us after putting off their treatment regret their decision to wait so long.
Why You Shouldn’t Wait
Oral pains are not something you should ignore in the hopes they’ll go away. In all instances, early detection and treatment yield the best results. Ignoring the initial warning signs in favor of waiting it out really just means giving an untreated issue time to get worse and spread throughout the body, potentially causing a variety of problems:
- Sensory: The small amount of pain a minor problem causes may seem manageable at first, but dental issues tend to snowball when ignored. What may start out as mild tenderness can quickly become severe, constant pain. That pain will almost certainly affect work performance as well, since increased pain tends to increase stress levels. Not only will the pain increase the longer a dental problem is left untreated, but allowing a problem to progress to later stages often requires more intensive treatment.
- Monetary: The main reason early treatment is most effective is that the problem hasn’t had time to spread. Smaller, isolated incidents require less invasive or intensive procedures, and sometimes they can even be remedied with relatively minor treatments. The longer a patient waits, however, the more expensive the inevitable treatment becomes. Early-stage gum disease, for instance, may be reversed with a simple deep cleaning at our office and better oral care at home. But late-stage gum disease is incurable and may even require surgical intervention.
- Wellness: Allowing an oral disease to continue untreated means that, in addition to wreaking havoc on the mouth, the issue has more time to spread. The mouth is a gateway to the body, so allowing untreated infection or disease to roam free in the mouth is just giving it free rein over the rest of the body. The stomach is one of the first body parts to suffer negative consequences after another part is injured or infected, so it’s no wonder that many patients get stomach aches after ignoring a toothache.
In the long run, ignoring dental problems usually becomes painful and costly, and sometimes even leads to further health problems that require treatment from a specialist. If you’re experiencing oral pain now, book an appointment with Parker & Pennington Dentistry at our office located in Jacksonville Beach, FL before it becomes worse. Let us help!
