Dr. Charles W. Briscoe, DDS

Cavities are caused by sugar eating bacteria that attacked the teeth. As their destruction goes deeper, through the enamel into the substructure, the distance to the nerve is less. Ultimately the decay will reach the nerve and cause pain, not just sensitivity. If a tooth is sensitive, it needs professional attention! Don’t delay, as it’s getting worse by the moment. Besides, decay on front teeth usually shows as dark areas that you can see when you look closely in the mirror at your teeth.

Absolutely! If you are doing home whitening, whiten until you feel you have achieved what you want. Then do the bonding. If you whiten before the bonding, and the bonding is whiter than your teeth, then you can try whitening some more. But it’s better to do the whitening before the bonding.

If you can handle the pain, theoretically, you don’t need to do anything. The pain is typically what motivates the patients to call for help. If you have pain but it goes away, and you like to gamble, don’t do anything. In my experience, typically the tooth aches come back – usually with a vengeance. Should you have swelling, then you have an infection. That should definitely be treated as it spreads to other parts of your body. The infection weakens your immune system, which is trying to fight other things – like Covid!

The larger the filling the weaker the tooth will become. Small little fillings, whether they are silver or composite resin, have a lot of tooth surrounding them to support them. When the fillings get too big, there is not enough tooth to support the filling. Silver fillings expand and contract and as such can create cracks in teeth when they expand and gaps between the filling in the tooth when the silver contracts.

A deep cleaning really is dependent upon the health of your gums and bone. So it’s an individual thing. My experience with most patience is that in the 2 to 3 year range after deep cleaning, the patient motivation and enthusiasm start to slip, and the Health of the gum starts to slide downhill. In that timeframe, typically some level of deep cleaning, either localized to certain spots or certain areas, needs to be performed again.
A few patients actually get it the first time around, and really take care of their brushing and flossing and rubber tipping and water picking. And they are able to maintain on a three month recall basis without needing to go back through the deep cleaning process!

Dental implants should be monitored regularly to make sure the tissue around them is healthy and the bone surrounding them is stable. Depending on what the implant is supporting, crown or appliance, you certainly want to make sure the attachment of the abutment into the implant and the restoration to the abutments are all strong and well-connected. We typically see our implant patients quarterly. We clean the implant abutments and restorations, as well as the teeth. We want to make sure we maintain successful outcomes!

How long it takes to heal from implant surgery depends on where the surgery is done in the mouth. And is the gum tissue, the surgical site, in good shape before the surgery is done? Also, what is the density of the bone where the surgery is being done?
Of course, “healing from implant surgery” can mean different things to different people. If the question is how long will implant surgery Hurt, or how long will I be debilitated from it, that’s totally different than how long it takes the bone to heal around the implant for the implant to be utilized.
If the surgical site and the gum in the area are in good shape and healthy, then any discomfort in the area should disappear in the first day or two. Advil or Tylenol should be sufficient to cover any discomfort. If the bone is softer and the gum is not as healthy as it should’ve been, it may take a week or more for the area to feel comfortable.
The actual healing, where the bone solidifies around the implant and holds it solid, can take 3 to 6 months. The timing depends upon the health of the bone, bone density, tissue health, and what if anything is around the healing cap of the implant and the opposing occlusion.
Hopefully this has been helpful and gives you some insight into implant surgery!

Great question! Each person is different, and each mouth is different. Partial dentures replacing just a few teeth are much more readily adapted to by an individual. If only one arch has a partial denture in it, upper or lower, that usually just takes a short time. If there are both arches needing to be restored with partial dentures and there are many teeth on the dentures, those will take longer for the patient to adapt to.
The partial dentures replace the space that is there. They do not really replace your teeth, as those were the ideal things to have in your mouth to begin with.