Treatment of Gum disease

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Your dentist cannot treat gum disease without your help. It is essential that you brush your teeth and floss regularly.

In mild gingivitis, improving how you clean and your brushing technique may be sufficient to cure the problem. Your dentist will also professionally clean and polish your teeth for you.

Once calculus has formed you cannot remove this yourself and is essential that your dentist or hygienist carries out scaling for you on a regular basis. This removes the hard calculus from the tooth and polishes the tooth surface so that it is more difficult for plaque to attach itself.

As gum disease progresses into periodontal disease and the support of the tooth is affected, the deep pockets will need to be professionally cleaned on a regular basis, perhaps as frequently as every two months. Your dentist may also carry out root planning (removal of infected cementum from the root). This can be quite uncomfortable and a local anaesthetic may be used.

The aim of all these treatments is to remove plaque thoroughly and to make it as difficult for it to reform as possible. Antiseptic mouthwashes containing chlorhexidine may be used as a short term measure to chemically control plaque but they are not suitable to use for longer than one month.

Antibiotics may be necessary to control gum abscesses and to try and reduce the depth of deep pockets in advanced stages of gum disease. These can either be taken as tablets or sometimes placed directly in the pocket.

Acute ulcerative gingivitis is very easily treated with a three day course of the antibiotic metronidazole, and rarely returns.