1:36
Dr. Sanda Moldovan walks you through a self-exam to catch cavities and oral cancer early. Check your teeth for dark spots, your gums and cheeks for red or white patches, and your tongue for color changes. Do it 3 to 4 times a year.
Dr. Sanda Moldovan walks you through a self-exam to catch cavities and oral cancer early. Check your teeth for dark spots, your gums and cheeks for red or white patches, and your tongue for color changes. Do it 3 to 4 times a year.
Hi everyone, I'm Dr. Sandha. Welcome to the oral self exam. So I recommend that you really do this three to four times a year. So what should we be looking at? Just open wide and look at the surfaces of your teeth. Look to see any dark spots. Those might mean beginning of cavities and you should really go and check them out. And what you want to do is really grab a mirror and and really look on the side of your teeth as well to see any kind of dark spots that might be developing on your teeth. Also look at your gums. If you see anything that's abnormal, like red patches or white patches on your gums, or maybe right there on the side of your cheek, that also needs to be taken, needs your doctor to look at it because it might mean some signs of oral cancer potentially. And really with this oral self exam, we're preventing a lot of things, cavities, cancer, and a lot of pain potentially. The other things we should look at is your tongue. So what you want to do is really stick your tongue out and look all the way in the back of the throat. Check your tonsils to see for any redness or that's a sign of inflammation. The tonsils are really part of the immune system. And then the tongue, we want to make sure has a nice pink color and it doesn't have patches. In the next video, I'm going to explain to you, what does a tongue tell us? What do we see? What kind of nutritional imbalances or potential immune problems we can discover just by looking at our tongues? See you next week.
