Restorative

This part of our work occupies much of our time repairing the ravages of dental decay. Unfortunately no restoration is going to last forever so much of the time we are replacing old restorations that have gone “past their best”. Usually this is replacing old amalgam silver fillings so at least we can make the old poor looking tooth come back to life with great aesthetic fillings, hardly discernible from the tooth structure itself.

We try to make all of our restorative work look good as well as being functionally sound so there is obviously a big overlap between restorative and cosmetic work.

Fillings
These days we hardly use the old silver coloured metal fillings (amalgam). Instead we have beautiful tooth coloured filling materials which are bonded to your tooth structure. They are strong and hard wearing and look great. No longer do you need to put up with the horrible looking silver fillings and of course there is no metal or mercury in white fillings.

Crowns
Crowns are a complete coverage of your tooth to strengthen it and or make it more aesthetic. Recent advances in ceramic technology enable us to provide you with all ceramic crowns instead of the wildly used metal ceramic crowns. All ceramic crowns are very strong and extremely realistic much more so than the old style metal ceramics.

Veneers
Are also strong all ceramic restorations like crowns but only cover the front surface and tips of your teeth. They are therefore more conservative of tooth structure in the right circumstances. Beautiful results can be obtained with metal free ceramics.

Bridges
Give you back a missing tooth or more. They work by a crown on an adjacent tooth or two carrying the false crown in the space therefore giving a fixed replacement of the missing tooth.

Root treatments
Root treatment or otherwise known as root filling or root canal therapy or properly known as endodontics. Is a branch of dental treatment which is carried out to save a tooth from extraction when it is in trouble from the nerve (or pulp) tissue dying or actually being dead. A dying nerve will give tooth ache and the tooth may be painful to hot and cold stimulus, a throbbing pain may be experienced. The tooth may also be tender to bite on as the bone under the tooth becomes sore.

A dead tooth may be very tender to bite on as the bone becomes inflamed and bacteria gets involved and infection ensues. This is the case when someone refers to having a dental abscess. Swelling can also be apparent on the gum or even in the face near the infected tooth.

In either case the only two alternatives are to extract the tooth or to root treat it, this is preferable as it saves the tooth. It is more costly and time consuming to root treat a tooth but is very worth the time and investment. It involves cleaning, shaping and sterilising the space inside the tooth and then subsequently filling all the space so that there is no room for bacteria to harbour in the tooth to re infect the bone. Success rate is very high for keeping the tooth in place for years, even decades to come.

We are committed to working to best practice

We aim to provide dental care of consistently good quality for all patients.