General Dentistry

Dental Hygiene
Dentistry for Children
White Fillings
Root Canal Treatment
Dental Implants

Aiming to keep your smile healthy throughout life can mean keeping the same teeth for 80 years or more. Unlike some other bodily organs, once damaged, teeth can not repair themselves. Therefore, the best way to maintain your teeth throughout your life is to keep them healthy from the start. In addition to daily brushing and flossing at home, biannual visits to your dental hygienist will ensure that your teeth receive a deep cleaning by a dental professional.

Deep cleaning the teeth is important because it uses special instruments to remove built up dental calculus (hardened plaque) that is very solidly attached to the teeth and cannot be removed by a toothbrush. Areas of the mouth that are difficult to clean at home, such as below the gum line and around the back molars, will be thoroughly cleaned during a dental hygiene visit. Removing plaque and calculus from the teeth regularly helps to prevent gingivitis (gum disease) and periodontitis, an inflammatory gum disease that can lead to bone and tooth loss.

Because mouth bacteria can be easily transferred between family members, for example by kissing or sharing food, it is important for everyone in the family to have regular dental hygiene visits. To learn more about dental hygiene or book an appointment, call us at Broad Street Dental Centre.

Maintaining healthy teeth throughout life requires good oral hygiene that starts in childhood. The following is some information about dentistry that applies to children as they grow.

As babies, the teeth typically begin to erupt between 6 and 12 months of age. The Canadian Dental Association and the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry recommend a child’s first visit to the dentist be about the age of 1 year. Your dentist can answer questions regarding healthy tooth development and strategies for teeth cleaning. This first visit is a chance for parents to discuss the child’s oral care, the risks and prevention of early childhood caries, and the possible effects of prolonged thumb sucking or soother use.

By the time your child is pre-school aged, positive dental experiences are important to help your child feel comfortable visiting the dentist. A number of easy appointments may lead up to any more invasive work that needs to be done. Maintenance of the baby teeth is very important as it sets up long-term habits surrounding dental care. Furthermore, the baby teeth hold the space in the mouth for the adult teeth. Premature loss or damage to baby teeth can create issues of tooth crowding that can require orthodontic correction.

As children reach elementary school age, they may be more independent regarding their oral care, but parents should continue to supervise brushing and flossing to ensure adequate teeth cleaning is occurring. Around this age, baby teeth are gradually being replaced by adult teeth, so it is important to regularly visit your dentist to monitor these developments. Early screens for orthodontics can allow early treatment that may be more effective and less invasive than treatment that is undertaken at a later age.

Apart from their wisdom teeth, teenagers will have all of the teeth that they will keep throughout their lives. Good oral care and preventative maintenance of the teeth from this age is essential to keep their teeth healthy into their senior years. Regular dental checkups and instructions for effective oral care are important means to establish good dental hygiene. Orthodontics may be used during these years, but cosmetic dental treatments, such as whitening, veneers or implants should be delayed until early adulthood, when the position of the teeth is stabilized and the enamel is fully mineralized.

If you have questions regarding the oral care of your child or want more information on this topic, please contact us at Broad Street Dental.

When given the choice of what color filling we would like, most of us would choose a white filling over a silver/mercury filling that was used more traditionally in the past. Today, white filling materials, also known as composite resins or plastic fillings, are much more common place. Since its introduction to dentistry back in the 1960s, composite filling materials have made great strides in terms of its strength, ability to bond/adhere to the tooth and natural appearance. We have been able to take advantage of the improvements to use white filling materials in different locations and situations to conservatively treat both your needs for a healthy and attractive smile. However, filling material has its pros and cons. Here we discuss what white fillings are composed of and when and where they may be most useful. It is important to take the time to discuss how this impacts your particular concerns.

White fillings are generally made up of microscopic spheres of glass and ceramic within a plastic resin. The resin starts out as a semi-solid allow us to carefully shape it to the contours of your teeth and cavity. We are then able to use a very intense but otherwise ordinary blue light to turn that semi-solid resin into a solid and locking the glass and ceramic in place.

One advantage of a white filling material is that small alterations in the makeup of the hard glass and ceramic particles can create a variety of shades to match natural tooth colors. We can be much more conservative when preparing the tooth for the filling and preserving more healthy tooth structure. White filling materials provide a desirable aesthetic appearance, are particularly useful to restore small or moderate tooth damage, and can be useful in areas of tooth wear, where they may be applied directly to the tooth without drilling to reduce tooth sensitivity. Use of the material for a filling can usually be completed in one appointment and the material can be easily adjusted or altered in future.

Though composite resins are a great aesthetic tool for dentists, their main disadvantage is that their use in large restorations on molars can be limited. Alternative materials may be more suitable to stand up to the forces generated by the molars during eating or tooth grinding.

Have you been recommended a root canal for painful or damaged, lifeless or painful tooth? Though many people grimace when they hear the words ‘root canal’, we are actually quite thankful that this technique exists because it may be the only way to save a tooth that otherwise would need to be extracted. A root canal certainly beats having a missing tooth!

Root canal treatment may be called for when the nerves and blood vessels around a tooth become painful or infected due to a number of possible reasons, including trauma to the tooth, loss of blood supply to the tooth or bacterial infection of the tooth.During the root canal treatment, your dentist removes diseased or infected tissues from the inner canal of a tooth and seals the tooth from the inside, thereby preventing any further bacterial infection. The treatment allows the tooth to remain in the mouth, and depending on the tooth, your dentist will recommend that following the root canal, the tooth should be either filled or crowned. You should expect that the root canal treatment will take between 45 minutes and 2 hours, depending on the tooth, and may be completed in one or two office visits. Though many people think of a root canal as a painful process, most often, a root canal will actually relieve the pain of an infected tooth. If you have questions about this or other treatments, contact us as Broad Street Dental.

A dental implant is a very desirable treatment option to replace a missing tooth. Technically speaking a dental implant is the portion which is placed into the jaw bone and over a number of months fuses with the bone. It acts as a substitute for a natural tooth root. A crown, bridge, denture, or another device then uses this bone-integrated support to replace the missing tooth or teeth.

Implants are very durable and have a natural appearance, making them an excellent means to replace a missing tooth. In the medium to long term it is also a very cost effective treatment. Implants are cleaned like natural teeth, do not require preparation of adjacent teeth, and also feel much more natural than removable partial dentures.

Completion of a dental implant usually takes several months. The process of placing a dental implant begins with a titanium post being embedded into the existing bone structure under local anesthetic. A healing period of up to a few months is allowed so that the bone heals and integrates with the implant; throughout this time, regular checks of the bone and post will be done. If needed, temporary measures can be taken so that the gap between teeth where the post is healing in place will appear less aesthetically obvious. Once the post has healed in place, a crown is made to fit over the post, filling the gap and appearing as a normal tooth.

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