Are your teeth “Cracking Up”? I did not ask, “Are your teeth cracking you up?”. What I am asking is, “Are your crowns, fillings, veneers and/or your natural teeth cracking, chipping, fracturing or breaking?” If you have either a chipped tooth, a broken tooth, a fractured tooth or cracked tooth in the front smile teeth or the back chewing teeth it is very important to have a comprehensive dental examination.
Your dentist can repair what is broken before it breaks down any more with tooth colored fillings, or dental veneers and porcelain crowns. Early treatment can help you avoid even more costly treatment like root canals, bone surgery and/or a tooth extraction and tooth implants. But, more importantly, if the tooth did not break down due to direct trauma, your dentist and you should evaluate “why” the tooth is breaking down. At Artistic Dentistry of Atlanta we take a very comprehensive approach to your dental care because the “why” it happened is as important as the “how” it happened.
Many times it is the underlying etiology of the chipped, cracked or broken tooth that is most important. You may have simply chipped your tooth when someone, or something hit your tooth…ouch! Or you may have a broken tooth because of a bite problem, crooked teeth or jaw problems.
By way of comparison consider a spot developing on your ceiling at home. Why is it there? How did it get there? What is the underlying cause? If you have a leak coming through your wall in your ceiling at home you will see the first signs of that leak as a darker spot.
You can paint over that spot and it may disappear for a while but if the cause, in this case the leak, is not fixed then the spot will return. And, if the leak is left alone, the spot will grow and grow until the entire ceiling is involved. The cost to repair the problem will go up and up when the ceiling finally collapses and all the water flows on to the floor and into the room below.
Something as simple as a crack or a chip in your tooth can be just like that leak spot. In some cases simply “patching it up” will not deliver the long-term problem solving solution. If we do not establish why it broke our patching will only mask the true cause of the problem and the “patch work” will fail.
At Artistic Dentistry of Atlanta we want all of our patients to have the option to keep their teeth happy and healthy for a lifetime. A big part of that goal becoming a reality is our comprehensive approach to all of your dental care. We look forward to offering you the option to having a great “Smile for a Lifetime”.
Peter Vanstrom, DDS
