Making a Strong Bond with Your Dentist
While it’s important to enjoy a good relationship with your local Placerville dentist, we don’t necessarily need “bonding time” with you, unless it’s for your teeth! Tooth bonding is a cost effective option to fix teeth damaged by chips, cavities and other disorders.
How Tooth Bonding Works
We can recommend dental bonding if your teeth have small chips, cracks or even large gaps. We can also use dental bonding to shore up teeth damaged by teeth grinding. The procedure is fairly fast, inexpensive and provides long-term results. If you’ve ever had a cavity filled, you’re familiar with the resins used for these procedures. These materials are a huge improvement over the metals and amalgams commonly used in the past by dentists.
When you need tooth bonding, our dentists first use a shade guide to match the bonding material to your tooth’s natural color, making the repair very hard to notice. After the tooth is prepared, a putty is molded and placed onto the tooth where needed. Then an ultraviolet light is used to “cure” the bond. Finally, polishing smooths the surface to match the rest of the tooth. The whole procedure takes about one hour. The dentists at the Placerville Dental Group are extremely experienced in the use of this material. Having someone like our Placerville dentists with experience and artistic design skills really helps.
Pros and Cons of Tooth Bonding
Dental bonding is not an expensive procedure, even when used cosmetically. Compared to veneers and crowns that must be made in a lab, tooth bonding is a bargain. It also requires very little alteration of the tooth to prepare the enamel to accept the material.
Of course, there are advantages to the more expensive procedures too. Not everyone is a good candidate for tooth bonding and sometimes a tooth is so decayed or damaged it cannot be saved by this method. These situations require a crown (after a root canal) or an extraction and replacement with an implant or a bridge.
The bonding material used is durable, but it is not stain resistant and does have a limited lifetime, as do most all dental treatments. A regular oral care routine combined with semi-annual visits for exams and cleanings tends to extend the life of all dental repairs, however, and this includes tooth bonding.
Everyone deserves a good-looking smile! If you have chipped or cracked teeth, make an appointment today for a tooth bonding consultation. Our Placerville dentists look forward to helping you with “experience” and “artistic skill”!
0 Comments