Early childhood caries, also known as baby bottle caries, is when an infant has severely decayed teeth and often infection caused by sugary drinks (this includes milk and formula), bottle feeding at night, and not cleaning their teeth etc.
This is a Google image, but exactly what I was seeing today.
We saw four children today with ECC, and treated three. This was by far the worst dental procedure I have ever had to be a part of. The parents come in with their babies (our patients were between 1.5-3 years) saying that their front teeth are bad, and they want them to be taken out. Up here that is really the only option that we have. Terry hates doing this, we were talking about it yesterday and were trying to make a plan where we would screen, and then have all of them come back for one day. This way we would only have one awful day instead of multiple bad days. Our ECC day (next Wed) already has two patients booked and we have only been in clinic two days...remembering that we ended up treating three today as well.
ECC is often the first time the infant comes to the dentist up here, talk about a traumatic first experience! I am not going to go through all of the details, but it takes three people to hold the child down, we freeze them and then extract the affected teeth. The poor babies scream and cry, it is just a horrible experience for all that are involved, and setting the child up for life-long dental phobia.
We are trying to educate parents, this is a pamphlet in Inuktitut on ECC
Here is some information from the College of Dental Hygienists:
Anyways, not the greatest blog, I know. Life is very different here and I have a feeling that this is not the first of my depressing blogs. In fact, I could share quite a few more sad stories tonight but I wont. I am still very happy to be here doing what little I can to help. I am learning a tremendous amount about a different culture and hope that I am opening up the eyes of those who may be reading this. I don't think many people realize that we have so many issues that need attention and help, right here in Canada.
Very well said
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