Sometimes people are not ready to restore their front teeth. There might be a need, whether from fractures, wear, large fillings….any number of reasons. But maybe they just are not psychologically or financially in a position to really ‘fix’ their teeth. Here’s a quick example: This tooth fractured, but the gentleman does not want to crown his front teeth just yet. So….what to do??
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So this area had too much space after braces, but everything else was ideal. Some patients would be fine with the space between these teeth, but it REALLY bothered this patient. So our solution was to add a bit of bonding to either tooth, closing the gap and making it look better.
At what point does a tooth need a veneer? We’ll discuss the criteria I use at a later date, but this nice young lady was told she needed veneers on these teeth. Now I’ll admit the teeth are not too pretty with the chipped and broken edges, but does it REALLY require veneers to properly restore them???
Chipped, broken teeth-before bonding
….and the laterals were bonded to close the spaces and make ideally-sized teeth:
After the bonding to close the spaces and re-create the correct tooth proportion
The second option is for the orthodontist to move the laterals into the middle of the space. The restorative dentist can then create ideally sized teeth. This gives the orthodontist the correct proportions for all the front teeth and allows the orthodontics to be finished without worrying about leaving spaces that are exact. However, it is a more difficult task for the restorative dentist.
Stone model during orthodontics
So the photo in the post below shows a ‘peg’ lateral that is very small proportionally compared to the other teeth around it. Knowing this, the orthodontist and I discussed our options. We could do one of two possible treatments. Both would lead to my eventual bonding of the tooth, or in this case, BOTH laterals, to increase the size and correct the proportion between all of this young lady’s teeth.
I won’t show the tooth completely cleaned out, but it turned out to have a very deep cavity. However, after placing the filling, you can barely tell the tooth had any work at all. It came out great!
Finished filling
Ok. Just a little bit into the tooth and you can already tell there’s a more going on inside than you could originally see.
Hidden cavity
Just saw this patient and thought we’d take photos of the procedure because I could see a ’shadow’ in the tooth, but absolutely nothing on her x-ray. Having done many teeth similarly, I thought this would be a good teaching case. Here’s a photo of the tooth before we started:
Tooth with cavity
