No two patients are alike and no two visits to the dental office are the same. Yet, for the endless variety of the dental care experience, your dentist has four goals that he and his staff try to fulfill at every appointment:
1. Make Your Mouth Healthier
The human mouth is an intricate system of muscles, soft tissues, teeth, and bones that must work in tandem to perform tasks essential to life, namely eating and communicating. The number of problems that can go wrong in the human mouth is long. The number of treatment options for those problems is even longer. Regardless of the specifics, your dentist will only recommend a treatment if it will improve or maintain an optimal level of oral health.
2. Make Your Mouth Perform Better
A few missing teeth, arches that don’t come together well, painful teeth and gums, and irritations in the soft tissue will impair your ability to bite, chew, swallow, speak, and even smile. Treatments from simple composite fillings to dental implant partial dentures are all designed and executed to restore the functionality of your mouth.
3. Make Your Smile Look Great
Today’s dentists have a motto: all dentistry is cosmetic. This means that all dental services should strive, whenever possible, to improve the appearance of a patient’s smile while also enhancing health and performance. For example, if a patient has a missing tooth – an issue that affects both the health and functionality of the mouth – a dental implant crown or a dental bridge will address both of those issues and also the overall esthetics of the smile.
4. Help You Feel Relaxed
From a purely practical perspective, patients who are physically and psychologically relaxed are easier to treat in the dental chair. From a more holistic perspective, relaxed patients often have better outcomes after treatment and stick to a maintenance plan better. Your dentist and his staff want you to feel comfortable and have a number of amenities on hand, like warm blankets, neck pillows, and nitrous oxide or oral sedation, to help you.
About Shawn Hofkes, DDS
With advanced training in oral and maxillofacial surgery and certification in oral and IV sedation, Shawn Hofkes, DDS provides advanced dental services from our state-of-the-art dentist office in Cerritos, CA. To schedule your appointment or consultation with Dr. Hofkes, contact us today. We proudly serve patients of all ages from Cerritos, Lakewood, Long Beach, Buena Park, and all surrounding communities.
