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Kelowna Restorative Dental Procedures 101: Part 1

Restorative dentistry Kelowna clinic
If you're feeling an ache in your mouth, you may want to consider visiting your local Kelowna dental clinic to have it checked before the issue worsens.

Photo by Ms-Ito via Flickr

By Dave Nixon

Our Kelowna dental clinic considers restorative procedures as the backbone of dentistry. They’re the procedures you love to hate, but they’re also the ones that are absolutely necessary to keep your smile and have a pain-free mouth throughout your life. There’s often a much greater sense of urgency to them than you might have for cosmetic or preventative procedures too, making them very important!

This first part of two articles will cover wisdom teeth extractions, fillings and bondings, root canals, and answer some of the common questions about all the restorative procedures we offer at our Kelowna dental clinic.

Wisdom Tooth Extractions

If you’re feeling any swelling or pressure behind the molars at the back of your mouth, you may need your wisdom teeth taken out.

Most don’t have room for wisdom teeth, so the teeth become “impacted”, causing a range of problems. It’s best to extra them as early as possible - symptoms show up as early as age 17, and as you age the bone surrounding the teeth gets more dense and makes extraction more difficult.

Why Extract Wisdom Teeth?

  1. Preserves bone support of adjacent teeth
  2. Prevent tooth decay and other damage
  3. Avoid painful infections of the teeth
  4. Prevent cysts and tumours
  5. Facilitate orthodontic treatment like braces

Having your wisdom teeth removed in a timely manner may prevent a more difficult procedure later on.

Fillings and Bondings

You’ve probably heard of fillings, which are used to fill cavities, fractures, or cracks in your teeth. Our Kelowna dental clinic uses a composite tooth coloured filling that can be used in all areas of the mouth to repair tooth damage.

A less common procedure than fillings is bondings. Ever wish you didn’t have that space between your front teeth? Esthetic bonding can fix tooth space problems, so just ask us to find if the procedure can help you!

Root Canals

You may need a root canal if you have a throbbing tooth pain keeping you up at night, a toothache sensitive to hot, cold, or sweet foods, or tooth pain accompanied by swelling, fever, trouble swallowing. Root canals are popularized as a terrifying, painful procedure, but really it’s a procedure that relieves existing pain!

Our goal is to put you out of pain as soon as possible. The procedure happens in two parts, first by making a hole in the top of your tooth and allowing the infection to train out over 1-2 weeks. Then the inside is cleaned and shaped and filled with a material to prevent infection. Once it’s closed, you’ll get a porcelain or gold crown over the tooth so it won’t break.

 

Our goal is to always make our patients as comfortable as possible, so please contact one of our staff if you have any questions regarding any of these procedures.