At Ivory Dental Center, we practice deliberate dentistry. That means listening to the person who’s going to be in the chair and giving them a more thorough consultation and examination before treatment gets done.

 Here are four key elements of our intake process that demonstrate that kind of deliberate dentistry – the kind that keeps your family’s dental health in the best condition for the long haul!

Listening to Concerns and Goals

 We put this one right up top because, in some ways, it’s the most important.

 Some dentists just get straight to an exam and treatment without any preamble that gets them more information about the dental patient and what they want.

 Here’s just one example – which teeth are you set on keeping or most worried about? Which ones do you know the status of better than others? Some teeth play a more valuable role than others in the mouth. So that’s something to keep in mind. As the dentist gives their professional opinion, they can do that with knowledge of what the patient has in mind.

 That on its own is an enormous part of the deliberate dentistry that protects your whole family from a range of worse outcomes regarding dental health. 

Health History

 Again, some dentists invest in this, and some don’t. But when they tell you to just hop up in the chair without any health history, they’re really doing you and themselves a disservice. Dentists need to know if you have any health conditions that could significantly relate to your dental work, so we make sure to take a beat before we start working to assess your health and learn more about your health history when you are coming in to get dental work done. 

Cancer Screening

 Our professionals also perform an oral cancer screen that can give you an early warning if something other than tooth conditions is wrong with your mouth…

 And early screening is important – it’s been clinically found to improve prognosis by quite a bit for most patients!

 So that’s another key part of what we do before working in the patient’s mouth.

Tooth Exam

 This is a more prosaic element of consultation and exam, but again, you can do it more thoroughly. That’s where the professionalism of our hygienists and dentist professionals can be seen firsthand. We really take the time to do everything right – not cutting corners!

X-rays

 X-rays are an excellent way to see beneath the gum line and see what’s happening with the teeth. X-rays can catch decay and other problems early and optimize treatment.

 That’s some of what we do at Ivory Dental Center to serve our patient’s families. Let the pros help with any dental issues and keep your family healthy for the long term.