Tag Archives: fillings

How to Treat Tooth Decay

Treatment for tooth decay varies according to how severe the decay is.

  • Brushing and flossing with fluoride toothpaste and/or receiving fluoride treatments may be enough to reverse early decay, before cavities have formed.
  • You need a filling if a cavity has formed. A filling is a material that plugs the cavity hole and restores a tooth to its original shape after your dentist has removed the decay. Continue reading

Basic Dental Instruments

© ct.gov

Whenever you visit a dentist, you tend to notice the many different dental tools that are laid down beside the chair. A dental professional uses a variety of dental equipment for examining, cleaning, cutting and restoring teeth. Not many are familiar with these instruments therefore here is a quick guide on the basic dental instruments available in a dental office and their usage. Continue reading

The Ozone Treatment for Cavities

HealOzone instrument - for sterilizing infected tooth

Can ozone be used to treat caries (cavities) without the need for drilling and filling? It seems that ozone therapy in dentistry is coming of age. If one of your teeth has only small areas of decay, we can often use ozone treatment to sterilise it. Bacteria that causes tooth decay is found deep within the tooth structure. Removing these bacteria would usually mean amputating the infected area of the tooth (and there’s always the risk that infected areas could be left behind). A further concern would be that the fillings put into the tooth are not a permanent solution, on average they last between 6 months and a couple of years. Each time the filling is replaced, the filling has to be larger and more of the tooth is damaged. This downward spiral usually leads to expensive dental reconstruction. Continue reading

Is it possible to reverse tooth decay?

©www.jyi.org

decayed teeth

Have a problem with tooth decay?  Tooth decay or otherwise called caries has been a vast predicament that affects most dentate people. According to the United States Surgeon General’s report, caries is stated to be the most common chronic childhood disease of children aged 5 to 17 years and is five times more common than asthma and seven times more common than hay fever.

How does our tooth get caries?

Tooth decay is a demineralization process of hard tissues in our mouth that are contributed by four major factors namely bacterial microorganism, sugar (carbohydrates), tooth surface and time. Without this four factors decay would not occur. A community of haphazard collection of bacteria on your tooth is called plaque.

This bio film of plaque is capable of fermenting carbohydrate substrates (sugars like sucrose and glucose) and producing acid causing the plaque pH to fall below 5 within 1-3 minutes. Repeated falls in pH results in demineralisation of tooth surface and leads to carious lesion formed.

Continue reading