Fillings? What fillings?
If you had a fair few fillings when you were a kid, and let’s face it, not many of us didn’t, then you can feel like your amalgam fillings never quite let you forget about all those sugary snacks and drinks you had, and all that toothbrushing you skipped.
Lugging around your amalgam fillings is like lugging around the evidence of a misspent youth that everyone gets to see every time you open your mouth to have a good yawn or a big loud laugh.
Thankfully, when it comes to advances in general dentistry, one of the most important, as far as patients are concerned, is the advent of white fillings. White fillings have been around for a quite a while now. When they first became available, the materials weren’t all that strong and it wasn’t uncommon for people to have to get them replaced every few years, especially if they ground their teeth at night.
Now, however, the white fillings we offer at Orpington Dental Practice in Orpington are much stronger and therefore last a lot longer.
White fillings are made of composite resin, which is a mixture of glass and plastic. They go in differently from amalgam fillings. We put the composite resin in in layers and after each layer, we use a UV light to harden, or cure, it. It can take several layers of composite resin to fill a cavity, and when we have, the filling will come level with the top of the tooth. What we do then is use tools to sculpt and shape the composite resin as we recreate the chewing surfaces of your teeth. Between each shaping attempt, we get you to bite down on a piece of blue marker paper so we can see where we need to remove a bit more resin.
Getting white fillings takes longer than getting amalgam fillings, but the end result is something that looks just like your tooth. Now when you laugh or yawn, no one will be able to look into your mouth and see that you were ever anything but a saint with the toothbrush and the sweets.
Come the spring, you can be forgiven if your teeth are showing the stains of all those mulled spicy drinks, those hot berry-apple crumbles, those heavy tomato-based stews. All these things leave tiny traces of themselves as surface stains on your tooth enamel.
Plaque never stops and neither should you
They all commented at some point or other on the power of his wonderful, white smile, hammering home the message to millions of Strictly fans that your smile is just as important as your other messages.
Most people are aware of the link between smoking and cancer, and because of the increase in mouth cancer incidents we offer you information and support as you cut down or stop smoking altogether.
Fixed braces
Does the idea of wearing metal braces make you cringe?
Straighter teeth are easier to clean. With fewer irregular gaps in between teeth, such as you find with crooked, crowded and gapped ones, it’s easier for brush and floss to do their work. And, it also means that there are fewer nooks and crannies for plaque and bacteria to build up in, meaning you are less likely to develop tooth decay and need extensive and expensive tooth repairs and restorations later in life.
Dental phobia ranges from a reluctance to book an appointment to a full-blown panic attack when sitting in the dentist’s chair. If you are somewhere on this spectrum, then maintaining your teeth is no laughing matter. It could mean that you haven’t had your teeth checked for years, which in turn makes it more likely that you will need work done. If, when you do bring yourself to the dental practice it turns out you need a tooth replacing with, for example, dental implant surgery, that’s only going to send your phobia back into the stratosphere. So, what’s the answer?
Things got better when dental porcelain came along, and there was another step forward in the 1950s when a dentist discovered a way to etch tooth enamel to create a better bonding surface. But it was not until the 1980s that veneers really started to come into their own for the general populace when dentists discovered a way to bond them permanently to the teeth.