Dental Restorations

How are teeth restored?

If part of your tooth has been lost, by decay or by it breaking or being worn away, it is often restored to its original shape using a filling material. There is a wide range of filling materials available.

Fillings

Dental amalgam (silver metal) fillings have been available for many years although new formulations have lower mercury content and tarnish less readily. This filling material is still in very common usage.

White fillings are usually made of a composite resin based material. These are newer and again their formulation has changed since they were first introduced. They can be matched to the original tooth colour and hence give a good appearance.

All filling materials can now be bonded to the remaining tooth, lessening the possibility of them falling out and also helping to support the remaining tooth.

Fillings can also be made of porcelain. This has to be crafted out of the mouth and therefore requires a second visit to secure it into place. Sometimes a composite resin can be crafted out of the mouth and the material made to be more hard and durable than would be possible when working inside the mouth. Gold is also occasionally used for fillings, but once again this requires more than one visit.

If a considerable amount of the tooth has been lost, then a crown may be required to restore it.

What is a Crown?

A crown is like a shell that fits over the tooth. It is cemented or bonded into place. The tooth must be strong enough to support the crown and therefore some preparatory work is often necessary.

As well as restoring teeth where a lot of the original tooth has been lost, crowns may also be used to change the appearance, size or shape of teeth. Crowns may cover the whole or a portion of the visible part of the tooth.

Crowns can be made from a variety of materials and can be various shapes. Gold has been a commonly used material for crowns, though its appearance often precludes its use at the front of the mouth.

Porcelain crowns can be manufactured to give a tooth-like appearance. They are hand crafted by a dental technician to give characteristics to match the other teeth in your mouth. Porcelain can be crafted to give a high degree of translucency, but because porcelain is inherently a brittle material, sometimes a metal sub-frame will be produced, usually made of a gold alloy, to increase the strength of the crown. We do not use nickel-containing alloys.

What is a Veneer?

A veneer can be regarded as a part-crown as it is, in effect, a laminate to one or more surfaces of the tooth.

Veneers

Veneers are made of porcelain and are retained onto the tooth surface by hard resin cements. They can be used to change the appearance, in terms of the colour and to a limited degree the shape, of teeth. Veneers usually require a degree of preparation in removing some of the tooth surface, but generally this is less than is required for a crown making veneers a less destructive procedure.