Repair Your Smile With an Athens, AL Restorative Dentist

Restorative dentistry really encompasses a lot of different services that we would provide, whether it be missing teeth or a tooth is cracked or damaged. Restorative dentistry kind of fills in all those gaps. So if you're missing a tooth, we may have the ability to put a bridge in there through restorative dentistry to replace the missing tooth. If there's a cracked or damaged tooth, restorative dentistry allows us to put a crown on that tooth. If there's a cavity in the tooth, through restorative dentistry, we can go in and put a tooth-colored filling in there to take the tooth that was unhealthy, and maybe it didn't function properly, and then restore it to proper function.

And so when we talk about restorative dentistry, it really does, I mean, you could have cracked or damaged teeth, you could have missing teeth, you could have decayed teeth. And what restorative dentistry does is allow us to go in through the use of a lot of different services and restore that function to those teeth so that the patient can then either smile the way that they want to smile or able to chew the way that they need to chew. It just restores function, basically.

We try to really focus on being able to treat the patient same day if possible, so we see on a regular basis, a patient calls and they say, “Hey, I've broken a tooth. I need to get in and get it looked at.” Well, most of the time when a patient's broken a tooth, they've broken the tooth around an existing filling, and really the option to restore that is a crown. Or they've broken a tooth and it has to come out, and then there's a bridge option there. But through same-day dentistry, especially crowns, I mean, it really has revolutionized the way that we do crowns. If somebody calls, has a broken tooth, we'll get them in and then through same-day dentistry, we're able to take that tooth and put a crown on it the same day through a much easier process than what you used to go through. I mean, used to if you broke a tooth and had to have a crown, you came into the dental office, they prepped the tooth, they took the impression with the putty in your mouth, and they put a temporary on the tooth that you had to wear for about two weeks, and in two weeks, you'd get a call from the dental office, and then you'd come back in and they'd take that temporary crown off and then cement your permanent crown on.

The way that happens now is you come into the dental office with a broken tooth, they take a digital scanner – or we take a digital scanner – scan the broken tooth and the opposing teeth, fix it. We scan that. There's no putty anywhere. The computer then takes that scan, we design the new crown on some 3D software, send it to a mill. It gets milled out, goes to the oven in about two hours, two hours fifteen minutes. You leave that day with a crown. There's no coming back for a second appointment. There's no wearing a temporary. You're not even ... you're still anesthetized. You have no feeling in the tooth, even when the crown gets cemented. So it's just by far a superior way to do crowns. I mean, it maximizes the patient's time because they just don't have to come back for a second visit, which is great.