Treatment
Crowns, fillings and root canals in Pearisburg
Repairing what's there before replacing it. A tooth you keep is nearly always better than one you replace, so most of what follows is about getting more years from the teeth you already have.
Fillings
Decay is cleaned out and the tooth rebuilt with a tooth-colored composite bonded to what remains. Bonding means less healthy tooth has to be cut away to hold the filling in, which is the real advantage over the silver fillings most of us grew up with.
If you already have silver fillings and they are sound, they do not need replacing simply for being silver. When one cracks, leaks or wears at the edges, that is the time to change it.
Crowns
When too little tooth is left for a filling to hold, or a tooth has split, a crown caps the whole thing and holds it together. A back tooth that has had a root canal is usually crowned as well, because it has become brittle and will otherwise fracture.
The tooth is shaped, scanned digitally rather than squeezed into impression putty, and the crown made to fit that scan.
Bridges and dentures
A bridge fills a single gap by anchoring to the teeth on either side. A partial denture replaces several teeth and lifts out. A full denture replaces an arch. Each has a real trade-off in cost, in how it feels, and in what it asks of the teeth left standing, and the honest comparison is a conversation rather than a webpage.
Where the bone allows, implants can support any of the three, which is what keeps a lower denture from moving around while you eat.
Root canal
When the nerve inside a tooth dies or becomes infected, the choice is to clean the inside of the tooth out and seal it, or to take the tooth out. A root canal has a worse reputation than it deserves: with the tooth properly numb it is a long filling appointment, and the pain people remember is the abscess that sent them in.
Gum treatment
Deeper cleaning below the gum line, under anesthetic, sometimes with laser therapy or ARESTIN placed in the pocket, then a maintenance cleaning every three or four months rather than every six. Gum disease is managed rather than cured, and the management works.
Extractions
Sometimes a tooth cannot be kept, and pretending otherwise costs a patient money for nothing. When it has to come out, we will say so plainly and talk through what goes in its place before your appointment.
Not sure which of these you need?
That is what an examination is for. Come in, we will look, and you will leave knowing what the options are and what each one costs.
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