I know I’m spending a long time discussing fractured/cracked teeth, but SO many people have them and just don’t know. Think silver fillings are the only reason? Think again..

How many of your teeth have a silver filling like this one?

How many of those same silver fillings have a crack like this underneath?

Ask your dentist about replacing these fillings. And don’t be surprised if some of these teeth end up needing a crown. A new filling in a tooth like this simply isn’t enough support as a long-term restoration.

Katherine asked to have this other filling replaced at the same time.  She didn’t like the way it looked and thought it would be easy enough to replace it while she had the cavity taken care of in the tooth in front of it.

Here’s another example. Katherine had a cavity starting in the tooth shown below. You can see the dark shadowing around the old silver filling:

Cracked teeth, gum surgery, possible root canals, pain and discomfort. So how could this have been prevented? Both of these teeth should have been supported and strengthened with crowns YEARS ago! The crowns would bind the teeth together greatly decreasing the pressure inside. This is why we talk about putting a crown on a tooth BEFORE it breaks. It’s more predictable, and could save you the time, money, and pain that this patient had to endure.

The reason the tooth hurts is that it is cracked INSIDE, not just outside. These old silver fillings have been acting like a wedge right up the middle of his poor tooth. Slowly, it has fractured the tooth from the inside out. Now this entire portion has broken. This is what has caused so much recent pain. But…..and this is SO important….the tooth has not had ANY other symptoms before this!

Here’s the problem. This back tooth has been causing a LOT of pain for this poor patient. He can’t bite even lightly without the tooth hurting a lot. Cold bothers it, and hot is starting to, also. This has been for the last week. The crack is evident on the back side of this tooth (near the arrow). But that’s NOT the only crack in the tooth. It’s just the most obvious.

Look at Cleo’s smile before and after she had her teeth fixed. She asked for teeth that were straighter and whiter. We completed this with a bridge and some crowns. What a difference!

You’ll recall the tooth Cleo had to have extracted. The temporary was used to ’shape’ the tissue in this area and aid the healing process. Here’s the original condition of her teeth, and the final results:

It’s difficult to even see where the tooth was extracted! The ‘fake’ tooth looks as if it emerges from under the tissue just like all the others. A beautiful result.

Cleo had the non-restorable tooth taken out. When a tooth is taken out the body immediately starts to take away the bone. Basically the body is saying, “No tooth….no bone.” This is a problem we’ll look into further when we discuss dental implants. But in the esthetic zone of the front teeth this can lead to devastating results. As the bone leaves, the gum tissue goes with it. Soon the area where the tooth came out looks ‘caved in’ and the gum tissue has migrated to a higher level than the teeth near it. It looks horrible.

Here’s an area on a different patient that has had only a moderate loss of tissue after a tooth was removed. This is because a dental implant was placed in the area.