Here’s another great example of what bonding can do for a cracked front tooth. A few years ago the tooth below was badly damaged and needed a root canal. Afterwards, the tooth was reconstructed to repair the cracked edge. I wasn’t involved in this first treatment, but recently the repair again broke off. The patient requested another repair with composite, or bonding.
Now take a look at the final result. This was completed with only bonding and, as I stated last time, no root canal was necessary. Both the patient and his mom were thrilled!
This is a quicky. The patient had an accident and cracked off a large portion of this front tooth. No root canal was needed, but it was close! The root canal specialist had placed a small ‘band aid’ filling to cover up the sensitive exposed tooth on the edge. I was asked to ‘reconstruct’ the tooth using composite (also called bonding)….not an easy task. Often these turn out poorly shaped, or the shade doesn’t blend well with the existing tooth.
You know how you get those ‘fake’ looking e-mails asking for personal information? It’s of course called ‘phishing’. Some of these can look VERY real and are hard to distinguish if it’s actually legitimate. Here’s a site where you can take a quiz and see how good you are at determining the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’ e-mails. I got 7 out of 10….how about you?
Finally! I’m finished with this tooth! And look at the great result we got for this patient!
Her tooth has been symptom free since we fixed it, so she probably will avoid a root canal. So to summarize, deep grooves OFTEN lead to cavities that are hard to detect and that can be very deep. Ask your dentist to carefully check any areas in your mouth that have these grooves.
Yup…the SAME tooth! But I promise I’m almost done. Again, sorry for the gross photos, but look at how big this cavity is! This was VERY close to the nerve in the tooth and almost required a root canal. And, believe it or not, the tooth had absolutely NO symptoms! Hot/cold/biting pressure didn’t hurt it at all.
This is going to gross out a few people, and for that I’m sorry. But look at where the cavity is located. It is in the MIDDLE of the tooth. So it had to have started on the biting surface, but look at the previous post. Again, there’s no obvious staining or ‘dark spots’ on the surface of this tooth. This a perfect example of a cavity getting in through a deep groove in a tooth and continuing without being seen.
Here’s another more obvious example. You can see a dark ’shadow’ inside the tooth below. But look at the grooves. There’s not even any obvious staining! Wait until you see how large THIS cavity was!
