Are You a Candidate for a Custom Mouth Guard?

Virtually anyone who is involved in athletics and who has basically healthy teeth and gums is a good candidate for a custom mouth guard. At Bell Dental, the restorative dentistry practice of Brian Bell DDS and Justin Crocker DDS, we serve our patients with mouth guards crafted from the finest materials to ensure that they fit comfortably yet snugly in their mouths while providing their delicate oral tissues with optimal protection from trauma. They are strong and durable, particularly in comparison to their off-the-shelf, boil-to-fit counterparts.

You may be surprised to learn that your best bet for obtaining a mouth guard is your local dentist’s office, but who knows the human mouth better than a skilled, experienced dentist? Our esteemed restorative dentists carefully evaluate mouth guard candidates at our Lake Jackson practice to ensure that we are providing them with the excellent oral protection they deserve.

Why should you invest in a custom mouth guard?

You are probably wondering why you should invest in a custom mouth guard when you could run down to a sporting goods store or a drug store and buy a boil-to-fit mouth guard for less and customize that to fit in your mouth or the mouth of your son or daughter in the comfort of your home. Wouldn’t it be more or less the same thing?

The answer is “absolutely not.”

While boil-to-fit mouth guards will conform to the wearers’ teeth when they bite down, the cheap materials from which they are made will inevitably stretch thin. This means that, even at their strongest, they are relatively weak. Over time, they will become only weaker and thinner. Conversely, the mouth guards we create are laboratory pressure laminated; they are multi-layered and highly resistant to tearing and stretching. On average, they maintain their structural integrity for two years of heavy wear.

Likewise, boil-to-fit mouth guards only conform to the grooves of the biting surfaces of the teeth. Otherwise they are not customized to fit the wearers’ mouths. We make sure that our mouth guards protect the entire surface area of every tooth, as well as the sensitive soft tissues of the mouth. Many over-the-counter mouth guards actually cause damage to the gums and the insides of the mouth, where ours are comfortable to wear at all times. Of course, in a traumatic event, our mouth guards provide maximum protection for the teeth and gums.

Does this mean that our mouth guards are more expensive than store-bought mouth guards? Yes, it does. But when our patients are still enjoying optimal protection from their custom mouth guards while their teammates are on their fifth or sixth set of store-bought mouth guards, the benefits of custom mouth guards become even clearer.

Learn More about Custom Mouth Guards

If you would like to find out whether you or your son or daughter is a good candidate for a custom mouth guard, we invite you to schedule your initial consultation at Bell Dental today.