Great question! You came to the right place.

Here at Sipes Dental, the dental hygienists perform five different types of professional dental cleanings.

And here’s why:

Your mouth is vital to your total body health. If you are at risk of losing teeth, you could be at risk for other things down the road. Don’t you enjoy eating the foods you like? Well eating a piece of steak can be a bit more challenging with missing teeth or even with a denture. Our teeth give us the opportunity to chew foods with ease so we can nourish our body with the proper nutrients it needs to sustain life and longevity.

That being said, let’s get right to it.

Today you’re going to learn the following:

What a dental cleaning is + why it’s important
What a preventive or ‘healthy mouth’ cleaning is
What a gingivitis cleaning is
What scaling and root planing is
What a full mouth debridement is
What a periodontal maintenance cleaning is and why they’re all important to understand

What is a dental cleaning and why is it important for you?

A professional dental cleaning is preventive procedure performed by a registered dental hygienist.

A dental cleaning is when the hygienist removes plaque build-up and/or tartar (also called dental calculus) along the gum-line with dental hand-scalers or ultrasonic-scalers. Plaque and tartar are essentially bacteria. Bacteria in our mouths can range from healthy (protective) bacteria to destructive (disease-causing) bacteria.

Having your teeth cleaned is very important because it can help prevent you from getting gum disease and is a great opportunity for you, as the patient, to ask questions that will help you improve your oral health at home.

During this appointment, we also take x-rays (usually once a year or as needed) to also establish a better understanding of what’s going on in your mouth.

Typically the dentist will come in at the end of the appointment to confirm the health of your mouth and recommend any necessary treatment (fillings, crowns, implants, braces etc) or propose any referrals to specialists.

What is a preventive cleaning?

This type of cleaning is what you know of as your ‘check-up’ appointments that occurs every 6 months.

It’s also what we refer to as a ‘healthy mouth’ cleaning or a dental prophylaxis. During these types of cleanings, we hygienists, remove bacteria at or near the gum-line.

This type of cleaning is the general goal for patients to always receive.

But that does not always happen… which leads us to the next type of cleaning.

What is a gingivitis cleaning?

Gingivitis can happen for quite a few reasons like not brushing twice a day for a minimum of two minutes or having a poor diet and lifestyle.

During a gingivitis cleaning we are providing a therapeutic treatment to bring your mouth back to a healthy state.

Gingivitis is when your gums are inflamed and bleeding due to a surplus of bacteria present.

If you have gingivitis, you may see blood when you brush/floss at home or your hygienist will be able to tell almost instantly.

Gingivitis is reversible, but if it persists it can lead to an advanced, irreversible version of gum disease called Periodontitis.

What is Scaling and Root Planing?

Scaling and root planing is a treatment that is performed by your dental hygienist after she/he has diagnosed you with periodontitis.

Periodontitis is when our own bodies develop an immune response from the type of bacteria present in our mouth.

That immune response looks like bone loss, gum detachment, bleeding, pus and bacteria harboring to the root surfaces of your teeth.

Scaling and root planing can be done on a single tooth or ALL of your teeth and is a NON-SURGICAL procedure.

If the gum disease is affecting your entire mouth, this type of appointment is broken up into two separate appointments where we inject local anesthesia and then clean (or scale) the right side of your mouth only and then bring you back a different day to scale the left side of your mouth.

During a scaling and root planing appointment, we go below the gum-line and remove (aka scale) calcified bacteria and smooth down (root planing) the root surfaces of the disease-affected teeth. This is done, in the hopes for the gums to reattach to the tooth and then shrink so our body stops stimulating our immune response and therefore, halt any further destruction.

If you have periodontitis and don’t know it and continue to go without care, the bacteria in your mouth will grow and can almost cover the entire surface of every tooth in your mouth which bring us to the next type of cleaning: a full mouth debridement.

What is a full mouth debridement?

Often times, I explain it to my patients like so: teaching children the difference between gross motor skills and fine motor skills. Gross motor skills involve large muscle groups whereas fine motor skills require smaller muscle groups.

A full mouth debridement is similar to the concept of establishing (but in the case… removing) gross motor skills. We remove all the big stuff in your mouth, let things heal and then have you return for a follow-up appointment a few weeks later to either perform scaling and root planing and/or a proceed with periodontal evaluation to determine the next best steps.

Usually during this procedure, local anesthesia is not necessary because we are just removing heavy tartar above your gum-line (sometimes slightly below) so when you come back for the scaling and root planing procedure, there’s much less bleeding and we can spend more time being thorough.

What is periodontal maintenance?

This type of cleaning is for those that have been treated with scaling and root planing. Typically after their scaling and root planing procedure is completed, we will have the patient return three months later to evaluate the disease and determine if their mouth is showing improvement.

There are some instances where some teeth did not respond to the scaling and root planing procedure like we would have hoped and if this is the case we may recommend a more invasive, surgical procedure called Osseous Surgery.

But, like I said earlier, periodontal disease is irreversible. That being said, periodontal maintenance cleanings are performed indefinitely or until we truly feel things are staying extremely stable and healthy.

During these types of cleanings, we still go below the gum-line to maintain the areas that have been scaled and root planed and oftentimes we require them 3-4 times a year, rather than every 6 months.

I hope this helped you understand things a bit better and if you ever have any questions, please email or call us.

What type of dental cleaning do I need?