 Hi, everybody. Andrea Cheroski here. I'm a mobile dental hygienist with my own practice, but I've been a dental professional for almost 18 years now, maybe almost 19 years for a while. And a very common question is what actually happens at my first dental appointment? Or if you haven't been to the dentist in a while, you're 25 years old, you're 30 years old, 40 years old, as an adult, when you're going to a dental office for the first time, what can you expect? How many x-rays are they going to take? What type of exams are they going to do? What if you have cavities? What's going to happen? So this is what happens. Every new patient, we book a new patient exam. This just means you are going to meet the dentist and they're going to look at your mouth and they're going to call out tooth numbers. They're going to check your gum health. We need to see a baseline of how things look now. So we do an overall assessment inside the mouth. For example, we look to see how many teeth you have and every single tooth we look to see what shape they're in. Have they had a cavity before? Is there a root canal? Is there a composite filling? Is there a crown? Is there a bridge? Is this tooth sensitive for you? We make note of all of these things. This is all part of the new patient exam. But we are also going to do what's called an oral cancer screening. It's not scary. All we do is we have a look inside the mouth with our tooth mirror and we check to see if there's any lumps or bumps inside the mouth. On your tongue, inside the cheeks, on your palate, that kind of thing. Because we're probably the only ones who are going to be looking in your mouth that closely. So we do check for anything that looks abnormal. This takes maybe a minute, maybe two. That's it. Now, when it comes to x-rays, you might be wondering how many x-rays are they going to take on you? Maybe you want to know because you just want to know what to expect or maybe you want to be able to pay for it. You want to know how much things are going to cost. What are they going to do? Please keep in mind, you can always say no to x-rays. They could be done at a later time if you're worried about cost or anything. If you just don't want x-rays that day, you typically don't have to have them. But we do like to take x-rays at the new patient exam appointment because if we don't have any to go by, we're not able to treat you properly if we can't see x-rays. We need to look inside that tooth to make sure everything's okay. Just because you don't have pain, it doesn't mean nothing else is happening. So typically, what we do is we are going to take what's called checkup bite wing x-rays. We might take two on this side, two on that side, or one on this side, one on this side, depending on if you're missing any teeth. These are to check if there's any cavities in between the teeth. And sometimes at new patient exams, we are also going to take an x-ray of your front top teeth and the front bottom teeth because those aren't x-rays we typically take. You know, we don't take those every six months to check for cavities. So it's nice to take them this time so we can check to how things look. And sometimes we take something that's called a panoramic x-ray where you stand and it goes around the head. We see a full overall pictures of all the teeth on the top, all the teeth on the bottom. I personally love that x-ray because we can see everything in one shot. It's not always covered by insurance companies or it's covered once every five years. So let's say you had that x-ray at another dental office two years ago, it might not be covered. So we might want to talk to you about that first because it is expensive. It's typically $70 to $90 or more depending on the dental office. But I personally love to take them because I can see a good overall picture and it helps us to get a baseline of how things look now. So let's say you come back in six months and you have a toothache up here, well we can take an x-ray but we'd like to compare it to what we have before. But that's all that typically happens at a new patient exam. Even if we notice in the x-rays you have a cavity or two or maybe you need a root canal or maybe you need a crown or bridge. We won't do everything that day. We will probably give you a list of a treatment plan. So we give you a list of things that we would like to get done so then you can plan things according to your schedule. Some people say, well, I don't really care. I need to get it all done. Let's just do it all next week if your office has time or some say, you know what, I need to budget for this because my insurance isn't going to cover everything if you have insurance. So let's do my crown next week and then let's wait a couple months for that cavity. Let's wait a couple more months for this or that. So it's kind of nice to have a good overall picture. So don't worry. Don't think for your first appointment at that dental office, you're going to have a new patient exam x-rays plus fixing cavities plus all of that. And then you have this big expensive bill afterwards. What we're going to do is the new patient exam, which is the full examination of your mouth and then also take x-rays. We might take two x-rays. We might take four. We might take five. It really depends on that office, but never hesitate to ask questions. There's nothing wrong with saying, do you mind explaining to me what you're doing today just so I have an idea? Because quite often they might just be going through the motions and they don't think to explain things because they might just assume you know what's happening. So don't be afraid to ask questions. So I do hope this helps you guys. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll see you in the next one.