Early childhood caries, or baby bottle
caries, a type of rampant and destructive tooth decay that I can't blame your child for.
- Your Baby cries at night,
he/she might be crying for milk or for just a simple need to feel secure or
even to have the diaper changed.
- You are a devoted mother, you
can't listen to those cries without response.
- Your husband can't sleep with
that noise around, he is tired after a long work day and he needs to have
good sleep before going to work on next early morning.
- You prepare the bottle, feed it to
your child, (or you let your child join your bed and you breast feed
him/her). Your baby enjoys the milk, feels secure because you are here,
He/She becomes calm, falls a sleep with the milk inside his/her mouth, you
too fall asleep, your husband enjoys a quite night........now everybody's
happy!!!!!
This scenario may takes place daily because
it makes every body happy at the end!!!!!
As a pediatric dentist, I can't regard this
as a happy ending. This is a recipe to destroy your baby's teeth.
Eventhough, I do
earn my living treating nursing caries, here's how you can
avoid it
:-)
- No sleep during nursing, no milk
during sleep.
- As soon as your child learns how
to use a cup, throw the bottle in the waste basket.
- use baby cup instead of a baby
bottle.
- Much safer for your child to sleep
in his/her own bed, you might accidentally damage him/her during sleep,
this will also, help you avoid breast feeding during sleep. ( your
husband might thank me for this!!!).
The same child after
treatment. Thanks to recent advances in the art of adhesive dentistry, I can
repair those teeth to nearly back to normal and natural look and function.
It takes about two hours to reconstruct a full child's mouth under general
anesthesia.
This is a typical clinical picture of
baby bottle caries. The upper front teeth are nearly destroyed while the
lower ones are nearly intact. This is due to the position of the tongue
during nursing that covers the lower teeth preventing milk from affecting
lower front teeth.
