It is an established fact that many of us still harbor vestiges of the so-called 'dental phobia' in us. As such, we fear making visits to the dentist - preferring to keep such dental visits to a minimum, and only when faced with painful dental conditions about which there is nothing we can do on our own. By so doing, we contravene one of the most commonly dished pieces of advice in medical forums: that one should make a point of going for a dental check up at least once every six months.

Visiting a dentist regularly is in your best interests, though, and you should find ways of overcoming your 'dental phobia' and going for that dental check up whenever it is due.

1) For one, by going for regular dental check ups, you protect yourself from the agony you would have to undergo if you let small (developing) dental problems, which a dentist could alert you during such a check up, to progress. An example would come in handy here. By not going for dental check ups, you risk having small dental cavities that are developing (and which can be curbed quite painless through technologies like abrasion) progressing to become major cavities that can only be addressed through tooth extraction - an unpleasant procedure by all accounts. Thus, though you may imagine that you are avoiding agony by postponing your visit to the dentist for regular dental check ups, in fact, you are only multiplying that agony, and transferring it to a future date when you may be less able to cope with it.

2) Secondly, visiting a dentist regularly offers you the possibility of saving yourself considerable sums of money. By having developing dental problems identified during such check up identified and sorted, you stand to save yourself huge sums of money you would otherwise have to spend in the major operations required to address them if you let them progress to be major crises. An example here comes in handy too. If you visit your dentist for a check up, and have the dentist identify a developing tooth cavity, they can proceed to address it by abrasion or filling up, which are not very expensive procedures. If you let the problem to progress to a level where it requires something like extraction and drilling into jaws, you end up with a situation that could set you back considerably financially. Yet it is a situation you could have saved yourself from by just submitting to regular visits to the dentist.

3) Thirdly, by visiting your dentist regularly for general dental check ups, you also stand to have other (non dental) medical issues that are developing in you identified and resolved. As a part of the dental check up, dentists check for other conditions that are known to predispose people to dental woes such diabetes, these being serious conditions by their own right. Early identification of such conditions (during a regular dentist check up) can make the difference between timely intervention - which tends to help, and late intervention, which tends not to be of much help.