Are you a little nervous about your upcoming dental appointment?

There’s no need to be! There are many things that you can do between dentist visits that will help reduce cost, worry and the need for rescue procedures. Done right, your visits can be cost-effective, worry-free and with a minimum of corrections.

Here’s how:

1. Check regularly.

The more often you see a dentist for regular checkups, the sooner they can detect problems while they are minor, and quickly deal with them.

Practically, this is often easier said than done. Visits to the dentist often take a back seat to matters of work and life, so visits become irregular.

Frequent trips to the dentist are also expensive (though far less expensive than fixing a major problem) and involves taking time off work, which also deters many visitors.

So we ignore calls for appointments, and go only when we detect problems and pain ourselves. Pain is often a symptom of an advanced problem which may not be easy nor cheap to address.

Smilo can help us to keep up our regular checkups without having to take a morning off work to visit the dentist, and will detect problems while they are minor and easily handled. You can follow the assessment on the app of the state of your smile, confident that you are on top of your dental health.

2. Have no fear of embarrassment

We know many of the things that we need to do for healthy teeth – brushing, flossing, avoiding sugar and not using them to open stubborn packages…

We KNOW this but, being human, we often don’t. I mean, who flosses that often anyway?

This leads to another human fear: of judgement. Our mouth is a very personal area of our body, and fronting up to the dentist who can tell how many extra scoops of icecream we have had in a year can feel like a heavy weight of shame.

And then we will hear the dentist tell us again how we should floss, scrub, and avoid the things we like.

This does not exactly entice us to go back in a hurry, which makes it worse, and now you have to deal with more uncertainty of what they will say the longer you leave it.

On the other hand, sharing this moment with the Smilo app can let you pout at it or comply with it without feeling that you have let anyone down. Smilo might assess your teeth, but will not judge you.

3. Keep up a routine

Constant vigilance is key to many areas of health. Fitness, for example, thrives on maintaining a regular pattern of activity and diet to help you achieve your goals.

This is easy when you can see gains, so to keep your fitness motivation up, measure and improve whatever you can – your waist line, how long you can run at 8km/h, and the amount of weight that you can lift.

Keeping up home care of your teeth usually gives no feedback. No score to improve.

However, Smilo does! Smilo will give you numbers and a rating to improve, so you can see where all your effort into tooth and gum care is paying off.

There is motivation in feedback, and the reassurance to know that your mouth is top of the high scores.

4. Assess minor problems instead of ignoring them

The occasional bleeding gum is no cause for alarm… but it shouldn’t be ignored either.

Gum disease is both common and a problem. If your gums are bleeding, you need to know what’s going on. It could be something simple – eating different foods for a while, or using different toothpaste. But if ignored, you could be well on the way to a nasty case of gingivitis, and further problems resulting from that.

Regular selfies with Smilo will help identify what’s going on instantly, and can tell you if the problem is worse than before. It will let you know what can be done in the short-term, see if matters improve, then make a call on whether it is time to schedule an appointment.

5. Share and enjoy: Let your dentist know everything

Having your dentist know other areas of your health and lifestyle can help to identify which issues may be caused by which condition. Recalling all of this while you sit in their chair can be a little difficult for both of you!

Be ready with all of your medical information ahead of time. Smilo lets you have a text conversation with your dentist from your own home, so you have all the information they need, and can provide them accurately.

You can also share your progress in how well you are keeping up certain healthy practices, as well as allowing them to keep track of how well you have taken to their treatment. Just take a few photos and send them along to let your dentist know that it is all going well.

Regular contact will ease any anxiety you might have over a recent procedure, as your dentist will be able to advise when it is proceeding normally, or if you might want to come in for an adjustment.

These and many other benefits are available for you with the Smilo app.