Shelby Twp. Dentist Explains Different Types of Dental Fillings
Hi, this is Dr. Antolak from thegentledentist.com, in Shelby Twp., Michigan. Our phone number is 586-247-3500.
I’m holding a model of some teeth and what I wanted to do was to talk about the different types of fillings that are available at our Shelby Twp., dental office.
The days, of the silver mercury amalgam fillings are over. I haven’t placed one of those, in any of my dental patients here for the last, probably 15 years. And the reason why, is silver amalgam fillings contains mercury, mercury expands and contracts and with that, you can find that there’s some stress fractures in teeth. Many times these teeth have old fillings in them, are cracked and they have micro fractures in them, and we often have dental patients who come in, who break off part of their tooth from old amalgam fillings.
Now they do work, they have worked for over 100 years. It has been the choice. But now, with the advent of technology, we use tooth-colored composite materials. And what I want to do today, is just to discuss a little bit about that and how they work and why they work and what’s all about that. Because that is the majority of the type of material that we use for that.
So, first thing I do,after we numb you up adequately is to remove the cavity that’s in the tooth. And then, we’ll use what’s called a bonding agent. That’s this material right here in this purple bottle. And this little brush here. And we we apply that right to the tooth surface. And then once we do that, then we have the ability then to use filling material called composite resin.
Composite resin is a plastic material. It’s pretty neat because what it does is it gives us the ability to actually adapt the tooth, adapt the filling right directly to the tooth. We then secure it and harden it up with our lights.
So, for example, with this material here I’m just going to take a little piece off and then show you how this works. What we’ll do is to apply it to the biting surface here. If it’s to the side of the tooth we can apply it to the side of the tooth. It’s soft and as you can see I mold it around, I can move it around a bit. We do this also when we bond front teeth.
We can move it around however we want to, and once we have the position we like, and we smooth it out as much as possible, then we use our curing light. This is a blue light that will actually harden it. So I’m just going to go ahead and for just a moment I’m going to just cure it. It just takes a couple seconds to do so. And then, what we’ll notice is that this model is not going to actually stick. As you can y see it’s very hard. And now I can just actually remove it. And what we see now, is that the material is very hard to the point where it literally crumbles if I have to push on it. What we do, is we harden it up a little bit more with the light and it becomes just about as hard as the natural tooth gets, so, it’s very hard.
The beauty of the composite materials, is that they’re non toxic. When there’s mercury in a filling, that eventually can leach out, and the mercury vapors are the things that are dangerous that get into our bloodstream and cause all kinds of different problems.
Now, I don’t actually remove the silver amalgam fillings just to remove them. I remove them if it’s required to do so. Of course, unless somebody wants to come in, and they say, hey you know what I want to have my silver fillings removed. Then I’ll go ahead and do that. We do that in a safe manner where we put a little device over the tooth so that really eliminates and reduces the amount of mercury vapors that are emitted.
Once that’s done, we can choose the color of the composite material, that plastic material. Depending on the shade of the persons teeth, we can blend it in and it has a chameleon effect and it blends in really nicely. They last for years, there strong, they’ve been working out for a long time. There’s no sensitivity with them and they’re very functional.
So if this is the type of dentistry that you’re looking for; one that is clean and current with technology. You can give us a call at our Shelby Twp. dental office at 586-247-3500. Thank you.