Repair Teeth With Matching Materials
Well, we see a lot of fillings, the old silver mercury fillings, and I have them myself. I don’t have them anymore. The truth is that those were placed because they were easy to place and they were cheap. They didn’t look like teeth, but they functioned well. They can. The problem with the silver mercury fillings, and let’s just ignore the fact that the name is mercury filling, to understand that the properties of that is such that they expand and contract, and they do it differently than teeth do. And, so the mercury fillings tend to crack teeth over time and cause cracks to form. The other thing that they have a problem with is that they don’t seal out bacteria particularly well over time. Most people don’t realize this, but mercury fillings are set to seal teeth by rusting at the edges.
The tooth-color fillings that we do place, again, they’re composite material that’s actually chemically bonded to the entire tooth structure. So, that’s a much more stronger thing, so we don’t have to worry about that causing a crack in a tooth. Chemically bonded filling is much stronger. Granted, they do have more steps for us as a dentist to place, but quite honestly, after placing 40,000 or 50,000 of these fillings, that’s not really a concern. Just follows the steps and patients do well.
Getting out nasty, black, silver mercury fillings, and making teeth look like teeth that function well, that’s as good as it gets. And, frankly, that’s the bread and butter of dentistry that we do all the time. All dentists do that, but we do it here and we do it real well.