It’s becoming a year of body renovations for me.  I’ll share some others in upcoming posts but the latest “improvement” has been to get a mouth guard to prevent me grinding my teeth while I sleep at night.  I had complained to my dentist about my jaw occasionally locking up and not being able to open it enough to eat food or properly chew.  So we decided to see if it was due to my grinding my teeth at night.

Let me interject here, that I REALLY like my dentist.  I’ve gone to him for many years now and he never recommends anything just to make a few more bucks.  So I trust his judgement in our decision to try this nightly guard.

Ok, here’s the really cool stuff.  He and his assistant used their new scanner which takes 6000 images per second to make a 3D image of my teeth and gums.  It took about 20-30 minutes and was painless.  In former times, they used to use some kind of moulding material but he said, when they removed it after it set, especially in cases like mine, where there was a fair amount of gum recession etc, that those parts would break off or not get properly captured.

After I left the office, I thought, “Darn, I never took a picture or video of what the scan showed us.”   I hoped that when I went back to have him fit the guard, he would still have all the pictures etc.  Well, he did!  Lucky you.

Here’s photo of one part of what the scanner captures.  A frontal assault, you could say.

Here’s another view of the inside of my upper teeth and palate, which is what the guard protects at night.

And lastly, here’s a link to a video of him explaining what we’re looking at with all those colours. And what’s really cool is how he can rotate the image in 3D and separate out the top and bottom sections.  I hadn’t ever seen anything like this before and I found it fascinating.

Enjoy ’til next time,

Rich