 Hello everybody my name is Andrea and I have about 18 years of dental professional experience and you might want to know what is the difference between a bite ring a bite wing x-ray and a panoramic x-ray sometimes referred to as a pan. So if you're going to the dentist and we're talking about different x-rays you kind of want to know well do I really need them. How often do we take them how much do things cost so I'm going to share that with you. I actually had my teeth cleaning the other day and I had both of them taken on myself so I can show you guys the differences and approximately how much everything costs. So I'm just going to pull up my panoramic x-ray this is one that shows the top and bottom I'm just going to share my screen for you guys to see that. So this is my actual x-ray of my teeth. So this one I like patients to have every 10 years if not sooner if there's any issues. This is common x-ray we take if somebody is 15 or like early teenage years and we're talking about the wisdom teeth. This x-ray is the only way to see the wisdom teeth. I don't have my wisdom teeth so you can't see them here but they would be further back. There would be another molar back here. We can't get that other x-ray that like tinier one that you have to bite on that tab. We can't get that back far enough to see the wisdom tooth so this one is actually done where you stand and the x-ray machine part of it goes around the head. Super easy actually I prefer this one than the ones they take inside the mouth because if you have a tiny mouth if you're a child. You probably don't want that big thing inside the mouth but sometimes we do have to take that but this panoramic one is done around the head. And we like to take this one too on children. If they have a hard time putting those x-rays inside the mouth to take them internally we like this one because this can also show the baby teeth so it shows us the baby teeth and then the permanent teeth so it can show us the permanent teeth coming in. But in my case of course this is just my x-ray so I have all of my teeth except for the wisdom teeth. If you guys notice these white areas here these are for composite fillings so I had a cavity. Now if you're not a dental professional you're probably looking at this and saying I see a lot of white areas and dark areas what am I looking at. So as a dental professional we are trained to see certain landmarks. I'm not a dentist so I'm not allowed to diagnose anything on the x-ray but I like to talk to my patients about x-rays all the time so I point out things like see this white area here this white area here in this white area and even this one those are whiter than those other white areas so that is showing us that composite filling. If I ever had a root canal which I have not but if I had you would actually see a white line in the actual nerve of that tooth. Our nerves are black okay in the x-ray so if I had a root canal there would be a white line so I love this x-ray. The thing is they are expensive okay so this cost me about $90 so if you don't have the money if this is something that you want to wait on you probably can. Unless you're in a lot of pain and the dentist is telling you we need to take the panoramic x-ray because we need to see a larger area or you weren't able to take x-rays inside the mouth which are the tinier ones which I'm going to show you guys next. So those tinier x-rays there's different ones there's bite wings and there's periapicals there's other ones too but those are the common ones. So a bite wing just to show you guys what that looks like I'm going to share my screen for a moment. Notice how this one looks very different compared to the other one this is lopsided there we go is that the right way yes it is so that's better so see how it's just showing a certain area but we can see in between the teeth. This x-ray we take to check for cavities because cavities hide in between the teeth if you guys notice so we look for black areas again if you're a not trained dental professional you're probably looking at this and seeing black everywhere. But we look for specific tiny black areas I do have a couple I do have what's called incipient cavities so they're so tiny the enamel has started to become affected but the cavities are big enough to do a filling because they're not through the enamel yet. So yes there is such a thing as having a cavity but not needing to fix it because it's just that small. So this is what a bite wing is we can see in between the teeth and the top and bottom teeth at the same time so if you guys have any questions about those please let me know. The panoramic x-ray like I said I like to take on patients every 10 years just to get a good overall picture or if the patient is in pain or if they're at the age where it's time to get the wisdom teeth taken out we need to take that x-ray. There's many other reasons but those are the more common ones bite wing x-rays though are very important. I tell patients every three years might be fine but if you're cavity prone you eat a lot of junk food drink a lot of pop we might even want them once a year. If not sooner because you want to catch those cavities when they're small to fix them or maintain them so they don't get bigger using different types of toothpaste that can actually help to keep the cavity the same size and not bigger. So let me know you guys if you have any questions comment below and I will talk to you guys very very soon.