 Hello everybody, Andrea here with Dental L Mobile Hygiene. So I have been in the dental profession for about 50 years. I have now owned my own mobile dental hygiene practice for about two years and it still amazes me how many patients I see have cold sensitive teeth and they've been living with that all of their life or for as long as they can remember. But let me tell you, you do not have to live with cold sensitive teeth. The cure, if you will, can be very easy but it can also take a few steps to get there. So it's not as simple as saying, this is why you have cold sensitive teeth. Here's a toothpaste, there you go. It's so much more than that. So what I do when I see my patients is I first look at their enamel. Do they have thin enamel? So I'm going to show you guys a couple differences. So I'm just gonna pause the video for one second and I'm going to show you what I mean by thin enamel. Okay guys, so I'm just sharing my screen. I just simply typed in thin tooth enamel from Google and this is what came up. So if your teeth look anything like, oh darn, is it gonna be slow for me? Darn, so can you guys see this? So I'm just gonna not click on it but I'm gonna show you guys. So if your teeth look anything like this one here, see how it's a little bit thin. You kind of notice the off yellow marks towards the gingival margin. That is a clear sign of thin enamel. If you wanna go so far as to look at this one, the teeth almost look see-through. That's thin enamel. But what about if your teeth look like this? Notice how it gets yellower, almost brown towards the top parts of the teeth, typically called long in the tooth. So if your teeth look longer, this is a clear sign of gingival recession, okay? So cold sensitive teeth can be from many things. From thin enamel, from when the teeth develop, they were just thin or from gingival recession, which is where you could have brushed too hard as a child, a teenager, and the gums that normally cover the teeth are now exposed. So your tooth is exposed, where the second layer is exposed, causing cold sensitivity. It could also be from clenching or grinding. So all of those different things lead to different treatments, but they can be treated. But your dental professional needs to take the time to discover what's really causing you that cold sensitivity. So what I do first is I look inside the mouth and look at all of the different aspects that could be causing your cold sensitivity. It might even be all of them. Your teeth might have come in thin, so thin enamel. You could also have gingival recession. You might also clench and grind something that I forgot to mention too, more than thin enamel is if you have acidic saliva. So if you're one of those people where we always tell you, you have cavities at every visit, you might have acidic saliva. That's also causing you cold sensitivity. So after I look inside the mouth, what I do is I have something called a desensitizer. So a desensitizer comes in like a little bottle that can only be applied by a dental professional. So you can't get it in the store. I refer to it as, it's like a car wax for your car. I don't know a lot about cars, but I like to think that's a good analogy. Where this desensitizer goes over those sensitive areas of your teeth, it's a thin, clear coating. You don't see it, you don't know it's there, but it's there to protect the outside elements. So your teeth can't be cold sensitive because your nerve isn't getting those messages to be cold sensitive. So I apply the desensitizer where it's needed. It does take about 20 seconds per tooth, which isn't a long time, but it can take time if it's every single tooth. And this should be applied by your dental professional at every appointment or at even every six months. And it works amazingly. It can be expensive, but patients do tell me that, hey, if that stops their cold sensitivity, they will pay for it because some people can't eat or drink properly without feeling that like, oh, that's so cold sensitive. And that's not normal. Another thing that I might suggest to you is to start using a different mouthwash and toothpaste. Because if you think about it, your teeth are inside the mouth, right? So what can you be doing to constantly be coating and protecting those teeth against cold sensitivity? So I don't like to mention companies of brands I don't like, but I will say there are brands out there that you've probably all seen commercials for to protect against cold sensitivity. They do work for 80% of the population, but if your teeth are still cold sensitive after using those products, you might need something else recommended by a dental professional. So we have products that we can only give you. So you can't buy in store, but we have products that might have a stronger concentration of sodium fluoride. There's also xylitol, but there's also different types of desensitizers that can really help such as hydroxyapatite, which is always hard for me to say, but there's many different things that we can apply for you. There's potassium nitrates. So all of these toothpaste do different things. The ones on the market, like I said, they work well, but you might need something additional. So like just as an example, I have different products here that I can suggest two people to try to really help with their cold sensitivity. Like this one has a higher concentration of fluoride and xylitol, and this one has xylitol and fluoride as well. Just using over the counter products just sometimes isn't enough. You need something bigger and better and you would be using this every day twice a day. So your teeth are constantly getting that protection. So I look at all of that to truly determine what your teeth need to prevent that cold sensitivity. And one product or solution might not work for everybody or I might suggest a toothpaste to you and that has solved all of your problems where you don't even need the mouthwash, you don't even need the desensitizer or you might need all of them. So get your dental professional to look. You do not need to suffer with cold sensitivity. It doesn't need to happen. In kind of a more extreme case, I have some patients where they're so cold sensitive that their gums have receded quite a bit where those areas is where, and it's pretty obvious that is causing the cold sensitivity. In some cases, I can apply a thin desensitizer over top but then plus a filling over top of that to really cover up those areas. So there's no way anything's getting in there to affect the nerve to make you more cold sensitive. So that can work too. Your restorative dental hygienist can apply that for you or a dentist in the dental office. I'm a mobile restorative dental hygienist so I can do that for you in your own home if that's what's needed. But that's kind of a last resort. It's not bad, but who wants a filling on top of their tooth if they don't need it? We prefer to do the least invasive as possible. Not saying that a filling's invasive, but it's just something extra that you have to pay for that you might not need. Why not spend less money getting a toothpaste and mouthwash first, see if that works. If not, then spend a little more money to put a filling over top to cover the whole thing. So there's many different options you don't have to suffer with cold sensitive teeth. So thank you guys for watching. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll talk to you guys in the next one.