These two teeth were in need of some help. The one had a large, old tooth-colored filling that had begun to discolor and decay. The tooth behind it also had a very large tooth-colored filling and was also starting to develop a cavity. You can see the margin of an old porcelain crown on the tooth behind it.
Old filling
A ‘wake board’ is what took care of the edge of this tooth. Ideally we’d like to retain the fractured portion of the tooth and try and bond it back onto the remaining tooth structure. When fit properly the crack is almost imperceptible and the tooth remains stable for a very long time. But since this was long-gone (sitting at the bottom of a lake somewhere) we would have to re-build the tooth out of composite.
Fractured tooth
I’ve stated before that I’m a big fan of the Firefox operating system. It feels a little faster that Internet explorer, has a few less bugs, and is still REALLY cool! Having said all that, this article to ’speed up’ Firefox was pretty interesting. I’m going to give it a try….if it doesn’t work I guess I’ll be using something else!
Article
My web site has added a few new photos of the office (with a special thanks to Tony and Jeff for the ‘update’). Check it out here.
Yes, I know it’s gross, but look how much tooth was destroyed by the existing cavity inside. This is a photo with almost all the decay cleaned out. And remember, there was no hot, cold, or bite sensitivity with these teeth even though they were full of bacteria-laden decay!
Yes, I’ve been referred to as a backup ‘freak’ when it comes to the data on my computer. But with a recent virus on my laptop now cleaned up it was an easy matter to restore the ‘good’ files that were found in the backup. Plus, as I’ve stated before all the photos I take would be impossible to reproduce, so backing up is a must. I recently saw this and am trying it out. It can make a mirror image of your existing drive, copying it exactly. Oh, and the basic edition is free. Take a look and see what you think: Macrium Reflect
As I said earlier, I’ve seen many more of these ‘hidden’ cavities. They’re tough to detect but are still really large. Here’s another example. This is what the tooth looked like beforehand:
And the final product…….they came out great! But when you look at where we started, there’s NO WAY you’d have known how extensive these were.
Look how big these cavities were!! They were HUGE! And NO hot, cold, or bite sensitivity with next to nothing on the x-ray. These are REALLY hard to diagnose!
So to review…we started out here:
A few minutes later we were here:
What would YOU want for YOUR tooth?
