Canker sores

What are they?
Canker sores are small, painful lesions that form on the soft tissues in your mouth: the insides of your lips, cheeks, under your tongue or at the base of your gums.

What causes them?
The cause for canker sores isn't precisely established. They may be triggered by poor nutrition, stress, food alergies or menstrual periods.

How are they treated?
They usually go away by themselves. For the pain, you can take ibuprofen or acetaminophen (Advil and Tylenol). To prevent the irritation caused by eating, drinking or brushing your teeth you can use Anbesol, Orajel, Orabase and Zilactin-B. All these are applied directly on the sore.

When should I go seek help?
1. If they're large and they last longer than 2 weeks, or are painful enough that they keep you from eating and drinking.
2. If you have fever or feel sick while having them.
3. If you have them more than 3 times per year

How can my doctor help me?
He can prescribe an anti-inflammatory (Aphthasol or Kenalog in Orabase) or collagenase inhibitor (Tetracycline or Peridex).

Breath mints and sugar

The ideea of taking a mint to freshen your breath seems pretty interesting to many people. The mint tastes good, usually sweet, and it makes your mouth smell good.
What these people don't know is that many breath mints contain sugar, thus making your breath smell even worse after a certain period of time.
Bad breath is usually caused by bacteria in your mouth that feed upon the things you eat, and produce wastes that are the source of your breath's smell. By eating mints, you may temporarily cover up the smell of your breath, but after a while it will return, smelling even worse.
Breath mints work because they make you think that your breath smells nice, using the fresh smell that they produce when you put them in your mouth. After eating breath mints, people don't worry about their breath anymore, thinking that the product did it's job.
Clinical quality mints as those sold by Dr. Katz's TheraBreath (check the links section), the ones sold by TriOral or BreathRx, are made without sugar. These type of mints are sweetened with xylitol, a non-sugar sweetener, so they really do what they are supposed to do.

Smokers' Breath / Cigarette Breath

Smokers' breath (or cigarette breath as some call it) isn't such a tough breath issue as it seems. Whether you don't want your parents to know that you're smoking or you're a person that has to talk a lot with people (I don't know, business man, something like that), you can make cigarette breath go away very easily. You can chew gum, brush your teeth (no, not for just 5 seconds) or you can simply eat something. Either way, it'll gradually disappear, I'd say instantly if you eat something (try fruits) or 1 hour if you don't do anything to rid it. If your clothes smell like smoke, no use though. To that, the only solution I can give you is smoking outside any building.

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Gettind rid of garlic and onions bad breath

I was surfing the net these days for some resources about garlic and onions. I didn't find too much, but I eventually found the solution. Garlic and onions produce sulfur in the breath for as long as 48 hours. Well, that's not exactly cool, because if you brush your teeth immediately, it just won't go away. You can brush and floss for even more than once, but the smell will still be there.
The solution (as I read on a website) is to drink some lemonade or even better, tea. This is said to get rid of it, but I'd brush my teeth too after drinking, just so I can make sure it's gone.

Brushing your teeth correctly

You need to brush every side including the gums for 15-20 seconds and at the end brush your tongue. Most people say that brushing their teeth does not help them. Well, it does, but you have to do it so that the brushing will remove all the bits of food between teeth. In order to achieve that, you must brush every side for a period of time! Don't just brush for 30 seconds and then say you're done. Brush them for 4-5 minutes, and don't miss any spots.

Don't forget to brush your tongue when you are done.

Bad breath from the stomach

Many people think that bad breath comes from the stomach. Wrong! It's a so called "myth" of bad breath. Bad breath may come from the stomach, but this happens in very few cases.

These are some rare sources of bad breath. Infection of tonsils or sinuses, nasal foreign bodies, hiatal hernia, chronic lung diseases, tumors, reflux(heartburn). Some other states/diseases cause typical breath odor:
- diabetes: sweet, fruity odor
- chronic renal failure: fishy
- liver cirrhosis: musty breath
- leukemia: old blood
- ovulation and menstruation: mousy breath
- some inherited diseases: fish odor

Also, food stagnation, gastritis and food reflux are causes of bad breath coming from the stomach.

Remember, this is very rare, as many people say and know that bad breath is coming from the stomach instead of the mouth. Read "General facts on bad breath" from this blog to find out more.

Bad breath when you wake up

In the morning, when you wake up, you feel that you have bad breath. Well, the breath is bad because all night long, your mouth has been dry. When you sleep, the body has a natural tendency to slow your body's saliva flow. This type of bad breath "occurs" when persons like lawayers or teachers talk very much, and then they do not talk at all for a long period of time.

Saliva naturally washes, dillutes and kills the bacterias in your mouth. When there is no more saliva, you can imagine yourself what happens. The washing and bacteria killing mecanism doesn't work no more.

Xerostomia is also a cause of having a dry mouth. Xerostomia can be a side effect of the medication a person is taking. Antihistamines (allergy and cold medications), antidepressants, blood pressure agents, diuretics, narcotics, or anti-anxiety medications are each known to produce xerostomia.

General facts about bad breath

Bad breath (or halitosis) is caused by odor-producing bacteria that grow in the mouth. These bacterias stay on the bits of food stuck between your teeth and on your tongue. If you brush and floss regularly, these bits will go away.

Smoking is also a cause of bad breath. Onions and garlic ar vegetables that contain pungent oils. These oils are carried through your lungs and out through your mouth.

There are several myths about bad breath that we will discuss in the following paragraphs. Some people say for example, that if you breathe in your hand, you can see if your breath is bad. WRONG! Because when you talk, you tend to bring the odors from the back of your mouth, and you don't do that when you breathe.
Another myth says that if you brush your teeth, the bad breath will go away. This is wrong again, because people generally brush their teeth 30 to 45 seconds, when they should do it for 2 minutes, brushing all the sides of the teeth, including the tongue where many bacterias lurk. And last but not least, we must say that Mouthwash will not make bad breath go away, you have to brush your teeth on all sides, and the tongue for the bad breath to go away.