Lake Dental Health Centre

Lake Cowichan, BC

What Does Your Smile Say About You?

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Want to succeed in business, fill up your social calendar, and get more romance into your life? One secret may be in your smile. Your smile — simple, straightforward, and most important, sincere — can attract more than admiring looks. A smiling face tells people that you’re an outgoing and intelligent person worth getting to know.

When someone has a big smile, it shows they’re willing to open up to others. Smiling can benefit your health, perception at work, social life, and romantic status. With that much at stake, it’s worthwhile to discover what your smile is saying about you — and how to interpret the smiles flashed your way.

Smiling Eyes Aren’t Just for the Irish

Many of us look at the mouth to judge a person’s mood, but people smile for all sorts of reasons: anger, fear, embarrassment, confusion, to deceive. It’s really your eyes that give you away.

The muscles around the eyes can’t be forced to look happy. When people smile for real, their cheeks rise and the skin around their eyes bunches up. In fact, in certain countries where suppressing emotion is a cultural norm, people look more at each other’s eyes to gauge emotion.

A Smile Makes You Look Successful

People who project a positive outlook are generally more open and flexible. They tend to cope better with challenges than people who are withdrawn and unsmiling. A smile conveys confidence and professionalism.

A study that followed a group of women for 30 years shows the lifetime benefits of smiling. The women who displayed genuinely happy smiles in their college yearbook photos went on to have happier marriages and greater wellbeing.

In the same study, a group of strangers looked at the college photos and reported their assumptions about the women’s personalities. The women who smiled were judged to be more positive and competent than those who didn’t.

Turn that Frown Upside Down

Want to be happy? Just smile. Believe it or not, forcing yourself to smile can actually make you happier.

Paul Ekman, PhD, a psychologist who is an expert in facial expressions, taught himself to arrange the muscles in his face to make certain expressions. To his surprise, he found himself feeling the emotions that he was mimicking. When he raised his cheeks, parted his lips, and turned the corners of his mouth up, he felt happier.

Ekman and his research partner went on to do a study of college students to see if they, too, would feel happier by making themselves smile. The researchers measured the students’ brain activity while the students followed instructions to smile using the muscles in their cheeks and around their mouths.

Whether the students smiled spontaneously or on purpose, the activity in their brains was virtually the same. They felt happy.

Smile Anxiety

Chipped or missing teeth, fillings, or discolored teeth are unveiled when your lips part to smile – so some people simply avoid it.

If you find yourself wanting to cover up your smile, you could be holding yourself back in more ways than you realize. Life is much more challenging for people who are so self-conscious about their teeth they don’t want to. Make an appointment with your dentist to talk about your concerns and potential corrections. You’ll be happy you did and wonder why you hadn’t sooner!

 

Treating Gum Disease Helps Rheumatoid Arthritis Sufferers

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Here’s one more reason to keep your teeth healthy. People, who suffer from gum disease and also have a severe form of rheumatoid arthritis, reduced their arthritic pain, number of swollen joints and the degree of morning stiffness when they cured their dental problems. Researchers from the Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine and University Hospitals of Cleveland reported on this new intervention for arthritis in the Journal of Periodontology. “It was exciting to find that if we eliminated the infection and inflammation in the gums, then patients with a severe kind of active rheumatoid arthritis reported improvement on the signs and symptoms of that disease,” said Nabil Bissada, D.D.S., chair of the department of periodontics at the dental school. “It gives us a new intervention,” adds Bissada. This is not the first time that gum disease and rheumatoid arthritis have been linked. According to another researcher in the study, Ali Askari, M.D., chair of the department of rheumatology at University Hospitals, “From way back, rheumatologists and other clinicians have been perplexed by the myth that gum disease may have a big role in causing systematic disease.” He added that historically teeth were pulled or antibiotics given for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, which actually treated the periodontitis. The patients got better. Askari and Bissada are part of a team of researchers that studied 40 patients with moderate to severe periodontal disease and a severe form of rheumatoid arthritis. The study results should prompt rheumatologists to encourage their patients to be aware of the link between periodontal disease and rheumatoid arthritis, says Askari. Bissada notes that gum disease tends to be prevalent in rheumatoid arthritis patients. Both inflammatory diseases share similarities in the progression of the disease over time. In both diseases, the soft and hard tissues are destroyed from inflammation caused by toxins from bacterial infection. “I’m optimistic that someday the biologic agents that we use successfully in treatment of rheumatoid arthritis will lead to improvement of periodontitis and would be available for use and treatment of this perplexing problem,” says Askari. “Again we are seeing another link where good oral health improves the overall health of an individual,” says Bissada, who adds that studies have linked gum disease to premature births, heart disease and diabetes.

Science Daily (May 29, 2009)

Stop the Pop

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Soft drinks, juices and sports drinks provide huge amounts of sugars to many diets, and drinking too much can cause tooth decay and harm your health. Learn how these beverages can cause tooth decay and what you can do to prevent it and improve your health.

Each day, soda consumption alone provides the average teenage boy about 15 teaspoons of refined sugars, the average girl about 10 teaspoons. These amounts roughly equal the recommended daily limits for teens’ sugar consumption from all foods.

Sugar and acid in soft drinks, juices and sports drinks can set up the perfect environment for tooth decay. Drinking too much of these beverage can contribute to other health problems, such as osteoporosis, kidney stones, and especially overweight and obesity, which are prime risk factors for type 2 diabetes in teens and adults.

Soft drinks are a problem not only for what they contain, but for what they push out of the diet, including vitamins, minerals and fiber. Less than 50% of adolescent girls consume enough calcium daily, which can lead to early development of osteoporosis. Girls who drink carbonated beverages are 5 times more likely to have bone fractures than those who don’t drink soda.

~ Missouri Dental Association

Headache Prevention

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Seems like a silly question, doesn’t it? If I had to boil it down to one concept that has made NTI therapy successful, it’s the acknowledgement that most chronic migraine and headache sufferers don’t (or won’t) admit that upon waking in the morning, having some degree of discomfort above their shoulders in completely “normal” for them. Not just headache or even full blow migraine. It could be the facial/forehead and back-of-the-neck combination pain, sore and stiff jaw, or “sinus” headache.

In comparison to the migraine episodes they experience, their morning headaches are somehow “manageable”, and therefore in their mind, not worthy of including in their complaints to their health care provider.

They’ve seen plenty of doctors for their headaches. They’re asked specific questions regarding the degree of pain that alters their normal function like, “When you get your worst headaches…”, and “What makes your headache worse?”, or “How many times per week/month do you have a migraine?”. Rarely, if ever, is a chronic migraine or headache sufferer asked, “Exactly when DON’T you have any degree of headache, even the slightest?”.

There are two simple questions to ask in a interview of a headache patient.

Question 1: On a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the worst discomfort above the shoulders that you could imagine (includes neck, jaw, sinus, headache or migraine pain), and 0 being no pain at all, how many mornings per week do you wake with a ZERO, that is, you feel fabulous?

That last part needs to be emphasized. To anyone else, not having pain upon waking is normal. Sure, you can still feel tired, but a lack of pain isn’t remarkable to the normal person. For the chronic headache and migraine pain sufferer, a degree of pain IS normal. For them, having no discomfort at all would be, well, fabulous. Perhaps unintentionally, the chronic headache and migraine pain sufferer avoids that acknowledgement.

Most chronic headache sufferers will hesitate with their reply, and then begin to rationalize their their answer before they provide it. They’ll begin by stating, “Well, when I get my really bad headaches…”, or, “Nobody ever really feels fabulous”, or some justification as to why it’s “within normal limits” for them to have discomfort upon waking. The practitioner must press on, and confirm how many mornings per week that the patient wakes with ZERO pain.

Experienced practitioners will soon find that being pain free is quite rare for the chronic headache sufferer, especially upon waking. The practitioner can remind the sufferer that waking daily with, say, liver pain, or kidney pain, is certainly not normal, and so it is with chronic headache pain. They can’t be helped to the fullest extent if their entire presentation is not understood.

Question 2: On those days that you don’t wake with a ZERO (that is, you have “a number”), what’s the average “number” that you have?

Now the practitioner will have a clearer picture of the patient’s condition and likelihood of the presence of nocturnal jaw clenching. Waking 5 days per week with a level 4 headache, to some chronic sufferers, is not worthy of reporting. They have learned that they must deal with the discomfort and reserve their complaints for the degree of migraine pain alters their daily lives. They are wary of being labeled “drug overuse” patients, because in some practitioners minds, constant headache, especially upon waking, could only be due to medication overuse.

The chronic sufferer figures that their worst headaches and migraine attacks are far more important to try and manage than their chronic “normal discomfort” existence. Besides, no one has been able to diagnose and alleviate their normal discomfort, anyway. However, to the practitioner, this information is critical in the assessment of the cause and/or perpetuation of their patient’s condition.

This is not to suggest that chronic nocturnal masticatory parafunction (ie, intense jaw clenching) is the lone cause of chronic headache or migraine pain. On the contrary, it is better considered as being a primary complicating factor and/or perpetuating influence on chronic headache and migraine pain. Better stated, habitual nocturnal jaw clenching cannot, by itself, cause chronic headache or migraine pain, but chronic headache and migraine pain cannot be completely managed in the presence of un diagnosed and uncontrolled nocturnal jaw clenching. In fact, without controlling nocturnal jaw clenching, traditional medical management of chronic headache and migraine pain typically less that satisfactory of falis altogether. As Andrew Blumenfeld, MD, likes to say, “Controlling chronic jaw clenching doesn’t cure migraine, but it can help reduce the frequency of migraine attacks…sometimes to zero”.

Following the first month of NTI therapy, the practitioner can re-ask the two question above. Although the patient might first proclaim, “I’m still having headaches” (as if no improvement had occurred), the practitioner may discover that the patient is now waking less frequently “with a number” and that the level of that number is reduced.. Continually using the two questions above is a handy tool to follow a patient’s progress.

-James P. Boyd, DDS, Developer of the NTI therapeutic protocol.