We know that you are working hard to keep your smile clean and sturdy. But we also understand that, sometimes, dental infections can pop up despite your best efforts! That is why our Toluca Lake dentists provide the restorative treatments that people need to overcome cavities and oral infections.
In today’s short article we will be talking about how we can repair teeth with varying degrees of dental infections. As you’ll see, we can help no matter what the current state of your smile!
Let’s start it off by talking about what we do to treat a simple, early cavity. This cavity has only infected the surface of the tooth—meaning the dental enamel and maybe a bit of the dentin. Because this cavity has not spread through and over the tooth, the restoration process should be pretty simple for our dental team. Once we clear away the infected material, we will use a resin compound to place a small, tooth-colored filling in the hole in your tooth.
Sometimes a cavity is left untreated for a period of time, and, consequently, the dental infection spreads over the surface of the tooth. When we eliminate the cavity, we will need to remove more of your dental structure. So, in order to restore the tooth post-treatment, our dental team will likely place a customized crown, rather than a filling. A crown is a more substantial restoration that allows our team to actually rebuild the missing portion of your tooth.
If a dental infection has burrowed through the outer layers of your tooth, and made it into your dental core, you will likely require root canal therapy. This is the treatment that we use to treat the most severe dental infections. During root canal treatment, our dental clears away all of the infected dental material, plus the dental pulp, nerves, and roots that sit in the center of the tooth. Once all of this is gone, we fill the remaining structure with an inert material, and then place a restoration.
As you would imagine it is fastest, simplest, and cheapest to treat dental infections when they are fairly new. So, if you think that you may have a cavity, please reach out to our Toluca Lake dentist to schedule a personal consultation!