Gum disease is a silent enemy to our health, the danger is in not treating it early enough!
Bleeding while flossing indicates the presence of under the gum ulcerated tissue! By being proactive, you save your teeth and your health because bacteria in the gums travel in the bloodstream and affect you brain, heart and general health!
The process of losing teeth goes as follows:
Slight inflammation due to illness or hormonal imbalance or not effective oral hygiene causes the gum to swell, which provides a shelter for food to hide, and a pantry for the bacteria to grow, causing acute inflammation and loss of the gum attachment to the teeth, causing the early stages of Periodontitis.
Loss of the attachment causes deeper pockets, which causes degradation of the teeth surfaces and loss of bone around the teeth and that is what we call Chronic Periodontal Disease, and that how people lose their teeth. At this stage, we try to continue non surgical therapy, by using laser treatment, local antibiotic placed under the gums and systemic antibiotics. But, if that fails, we have no choice but to refer you to the Periodontist (gum surgeon) after the Gum Therapy. Surgery is painful, but it saves the teeth.
We can start by doing a DNA testing of your saliva to find out what kind of unwanted bacteria is lingering in your mouth to cause the generalized bleeding and 4mm pockets that we saw while cleaning your teeth. The fact that the gums in your front teeth were bleeding easily means there is elevated bacterial counts in your gums. The DNA testing that we do may help us diagnose your gum disease better and possibly prescribe you antibiotics that target the correct bacteria in your mouth to take in addition to the deep cleaning. Here is the link to the website from Oral DNA (the company who we send the saliva sample to): https://www.oraldna.com/for-patients.html. We do the MyPerioPath test.
The deep cleaning procedure is usually done in 1 appointment but sometimes 2 appointments are needed due to insurance plan restrictions. 1 appointment allows us to clean your whole mouth at once without residual buildup when you leave. The gums will need to be numb for comfort and in most cases, we only need to use a topical gel rather than an injection.
Below is a link for a detailed explanation of what Gum disease is and why and how it is treated at each stage: https://www.nidcr.nih.gov/Oral, Health/Topics/GumDiseases/PeriodontalGumDisease.html