See How to Create a Stronger Smile
As far as the restorative options that we offer, there’s a broad range of those types of things. Again, it depends on what the patient needs. Probably the most basic, simple thing is a sealant and we do a lot of those on kids. It’s a preventive measure. It’s where the groove in the top of the molar tooth doesn’t fully seal all the way, so you put a resin in there that seals that off and that helps reduce decay by 80%. If they have a deeper hole that’s a cavity and they need a filling, then we clean the decay out, we put a composite resin in there that looks like a tooth. If a tooth is more broken up, there’s less tooth structure, it’s a weaker tooth structure, or they’ve got a huge filling in it and it’s breaking or root decaying around that, then you’ve got to go to a restoration like a crown. As far as those options, we do full-cast gold crowns. We have different kinds of crowns we can do, too. We have all-porcelain crowns, we have porcelain-fused metal crowns.
The thing about that is why do you have all those, why don’t you just use one? Well, it all depends. It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing. You have to look at the patient. How do they function? How hard are they on the teeth? What’s gonna give you the best aesthetics for that particular tooth? That’s why you have those different options, and you may use one over the other depending on what those things are. If somebody’s missing a tooth, you have a bridge option. You can prepare the two teeth on either side for crowns and those two teeth are connected by a false tooth. That cements into place. It’s a bridge. It’s pretty streamlined, pretty close to what the patient would have originally.
You can also do partials, removable partials. They work. We have a really good lab, does really good partials. I can make a partial to fit really well. Missing teeth, again, you’ve got the implant option. You can put an implant in, put a crown on that. Sometimes, you may have teeth that are not lined up quite ideally, spacing-wise, and that’s where before you do restorative stuff, you can do a little bit of orthodontics to move the teeth around to make spacing correct, or get teeth right, front and back, wherever you want them, before you do that type of work, as well.
That’s the cool thing about general dentistry: you can do all that stuff. You don’t have to send them off and it’s just more efficient to be … you have more control over what you’re doing.