General Dentistry
Our practice provides a wide range of dental services. We provide most types of dental services without having to refer you to other specialties. This flexibility saves you time and keeps your total dental care within one practice. Our emphasis is on total preventive care for our patients. Total care begins with regular hygiene visits, regular checkups and continued home oral health routines.
Our practice also provides complex services for restoring mouths that have been damaged by dental disease and injury and common problems that require cosmetic dentistry.
Composite Bonding
Tooth colored bonding is a common solution for:
- Fixing or repairing chipped or cracked teeth
- Reducing unsightly gaps or spaces between teeth
- Hiding discoloration or faded areas on the tooth’s surface
Composite bonding has many advantages:
- It is a quick process, which typically lasts less than one hour.
- It does not reduce as much of the tooth’s original structure.
- Composite resins come in many different tooth colors and provide better matching of shades to the natural color of your teeth.
- Composite bonds, however, are not as durable and long-lasting as veneers and crowns and may need to be re-touched or replaced in the future.
Composite bonds stain more easily and therefore require proper care and regular cleaning. In order to ensure the longest possible duration of the bonding, composites should be brushed and flossed daily. Common staining elements include coffee, tea, tobacco, foods and candy.
Tooth Extractions
Your third molars are more commonly called “wisdom teeth.” Usually appearing in the late teens or early twenties, third molars often lack the proper space in the jaw to erupt fully or even at all. This common condition is called impaction. When any tooth lacks the space to come through or simply develops in the wrong place of your jaw and becomes impacted, problems can arise. Primarily, damage to adjacent teeth and crowding can occur.
In certain cases, the wisdom tooth that cannot come through the gums becomes inflamed under the gums and in the jawbone, causing a sac to develop around the root of the tooth that then fills with liquid. This can cause a cyst or an abscess if it becomes infected. If either of these situations goes untreated, serious damage to the underlying bone and surrounding teeth and tissues can result.
Crown Lengthening
Crown lengthening is a surgical procedure where the position of the gum around a tooth is adjusted to expose more of the tooth structure. If a tooth is decayed, broken below the gum line or has insufficient crown height, there might not be enough tooth structure available to accommodate restoration procedures, such as a crown or bridge. In these instances, crown lengthening surgery may be necessary.
For comfort, a local anesthetic is used to numb the area. Typically, little to no discomfort is felt as we reshape the gum and bone tissue to expose more structure of the damaged tooth. Following the surgery, the treated area may be a little tender, sore or swollen; painkillers and antibiotics may be prescribed to help relieve discomfort and prevent infection from occurring.
In most cases, recovery time after crown lengthening surgery is minimal, and patients can resume their normal routines the day after surgery.