Posts Tagged ‘Restorations’

Neuromuscular Dentistry Can Change Your Life

November 13th, 2009

If you haven’t heard of neuromuscular dentistry, you’re missing out on the healthiest, most remarkable form of dentistry available. Neuromuscular dentistry considers the nerves and muscles and the correct positioning of the jaw. Traditional dentistry focuses only on the teeth and jaw, leaving out some of the elements that are critical to your entire mouth working in harmony.

The comprehensive approach of neuromuscular dentistry means that the solutions to your dental problems are more precise, more comfortable, longer lasting, and protect your teeth and jaw from future damage. Neuromuscular dentistry can also resolve and prevent TMD (temporomandibular joint disorder), a condition of the jaw joint that can cause chronic, debilitating pain throughout the body.

Your teeth and the nerves, muscles, and joints of your jaw must work together in harmony for good dental health. A misaligned bite (malocclusion) causes jaw tension that can spread to tension in your face, head, neck and shoulders.

When dental solutions including fillings, crowns, and dentures are created imprecisely or without taking your bite into consideration, they can actually create damaging problems with your bite. The results can include damage to the restorations, causing them to fail or wear out quickly, damage to other teeth, general discomfort or pain, and TMD.

Tooth grinding

Grinding your teeth is more than just an annoying problem, it can cause serious damage to your teeth. You may grind your teeth in your sleep and not be aware of it. Often the only noticeable symptoms are daytime headaches or a very irritated bedmate. Over time you can chip, crack, or break your teeth. You may experience toothaches for no apparent reason.

Some people can stop daytime clenching and grinding on their own, but it’s not something you can control in your sleep. A neuromuscular dentist can provide solutions for tooth grinding which can include nightguards, jaw exercises, stress relieving techniques, or even oral appliances or surgery to correct serious TMD.

Headaches and neck pain

TMD can strike in many ways. One common scenario involves severe headaches or neck and pain after an auto accident or injury. Believing that you have an unresolved neck injury from whiplash, you seek help from one doctor after the next, often getting prescriptions for heavy pain medications. Sometimes the pain meds help for a while, but the pain keeps coming back. This can go on for years or even a lifetime.

Doctors usually don’t make the connection. They believe that you have an elusive soft tissue injury or some other problem in your neck that they can’t pin down. In reality, trauma can trigger TMD. Only a neuromuscular dentist has the training and the equipment to diagnose and treat TMD, relieving your pain. The beauty of TMD treatment is that many patients begin to experience relief after their first visit.

Teeth Whitening Advice for Those Interested in Cosmetic Dentistry

November 10th, 2009

People are very much the same, although some things, like their color, can be different. I’m not talking about hair, skin or eye color, but the tooth color. You don’t want to be in the yellow team, do you? I thought so… So, the natural teeth color can be in a variety of shades; but, the shade that you practically have is worse, thanks to the cigarettes, the coffee, the cola, the red wine or even the cherries and blueberries that we are consummating. But there are other reasons why our teeth are getting shady colors, like aging, accumulation of plaque, tartar deposits or even the over consumption of fluoride which leads to a “mottled” look of the teeth. Of course there are more reasons why teeth are losing their original color like treatment with the antibiotic during childhood or trauma to the teeth which causes a brown, gray or black color …

So, now that we’re finished with mustering the reasons why teeth are getting “not so white”, let’s talk about how can we make them white? Dentistry has a specialized branch which takes care of the look of our teeth, called the cosmetic dentistry. The cosmetic dentistry treatments are vary. Here are a few of the most popular treatments: we have the “tooth bleaching”, or the simple teeth whitening, the Enamel shaping, which reshapes the contouring enamel of the tooth ,we have the bonding which helps with chipped or cracked teeth and the tooth veneers, those ultra-thin laminates that are affixed directly to the teeth.

The materials used by dentists in the past were gold or amalgam as fillings or for other restorations. Even then, some of these teeth were veneered in porcelain. Now, cosmetic dentistry uses porcelain for the entire dental work. Porcelain has a look very much like the natural tooth. The bond to the underlying tooth is made with resin adhesives. For the teeth whitening through laser bleaching the only material needed is the hydrogen peroxide gel. Anywhere you go, the dentist will use some product containing anywhere from 15% to 30% this substance. But, before you begin your teeth whitening treatment, the dentist will protect the soft tissues by placing a gel or a special shield. He will also use a gel to isolate the gum areas. After that he applies the hydrogen peroxide to the teeth. The use of a laser light increases the whitening effect. Then you must rinse off the bleaching gel and repeat this procedure for a few times. See? it really isn’t so hard and the result can bring only joy into our life.

Before you do a teeth whitening, make sure you don’t have any white fillings. The thing with them is that they will remain less white after the teeth whitening, then the newly bleached teeth. And another problem for those who want to go to a cosmetic dentistry, to perform a teeth whitening, is the after time. Can we eat, can we drink? Well …yes, but there is a common side effect, the teeth sensitivity. This sensitivity worries us although for only 24 hours, so it’s not that bad…

Cosmetic dentistry can be an option only once…if we put some effort. Because the teeth whitening’s effect can be maintained. This way, we also make a little money saving, by putting a little bit of effort. We most follow a few simple steps, and we practically earn some money doing that…So, for someone who just finished a session of teeth whitening at a cosmetic dentist, here are the rules to follow for keeping your new teeth white on for as much as you like…First, use a whitening toothpaste; second, brush or rinse immediately after eating; third, use a straw to drink coffee, tea, colas and red wine…and, last, only for the ladies use pink based lipstick.

So, finally, let’s see what our options are(what cosmetic dentistry can do): if you have tooth-colored fillings, crowns, caps or bonding in your front teeth then bleaching, as a teeth whitening method is not really recommended. These materials are keeping their color and not turn white as the teeth…So their next option can be tooth veneers or bonding (also at the cosmetic dentistry).The veneers are those porcelain or plastic pieces which are glued at the front of the teeth. They can be two variants for veneers: porcelain (indirect) veneers or composite (direct) veneers. At the other hand the cosmetic dentistry’s bonding uses composite resin to recolor the smile…

Besides the dental (in-office) whitening at the cosmetic dentistry it is used, like we said earlier, the home treatment for teeth whitening. Wow…teeth whitening, without cosmetic dentistry, in the comfort of your home. And the quality is the same with a cosmetic dentistry’s teeth whitening. The first method is brush-on teeth whitening, and it is about letting it dry on our teeth and tah-dah…in the morning they’re white. But attention, not doing this hole thing at the cosmetic dentistry has two flaws, if you get the teeth whitening formula wet even with saliva it becomes really easy rubbing off parts of the formula. Second flaw is about one of it’s ingredients, alcohol, which causes bad breath. Cosmetic dentistry’s alternative method is the use of all kind of bleaching gels. If you have the time and money, we suggest teeth whitening at the cosmetic dentistry. The home made “white” is more for keeping it.