Whilst there are lots of reasons why anyone might visit their dentist, if you have an issue that in particular is affecting your smile, then that is certainly the medical professional you want to go and see. Long gone are the days where dentists were seen as the person who drilled your teeth and made you sloosh your mouth out with that pink liquid.
Today, dentists still drill teeth (Sorry, that is not likely to change), but they can also offer a range of services that go beyond just filling in cavities. They can literally change the architecture of someone’s mouth by repairing, reshaping, and replacing damaged, stained, or missing teeth.
So if your smile is not what it once was, or you have never been happy with your smile and want to upgrade it, then here are 4 ways your dentist can help you to achieve the smile you want.
Teeth Whitening
One of the biggest reasons that someone’s smile is not what it was is due to the discolouration of their teeth. Discolouration can be caused by many things, but the main ones tend to be ageing, smoking and poor oral hygiene in terms of not brushing teeth often enough.
The point is that often someone might have perfectly healthy teeth and gums, but no matter how healthy teeth are, they can still discolour. The answer, apart from obviously brushing them more often, is teeth whitening. Teeth whitening can be done at home using customised kits, which are created from moulds of your teeth.
A second way is laser teeth whitening which takes at the dentist’s clinic. The beauty of this method, apart from your white teeth, is that the treatment can be effective after just one visit.
Porcelain Veneers
These can be used for a number of issues such as discolouration that whitening cannot resolve, gaps between teeth, crooked teeth, and teeth of irregular sizes and shapes.
The process normally takes place over several visits to your dentist and will always follow an evaluation to ensure that you are suitable for this kind of treatment.
The dentist will take an impression of your teeth and then some temporary placeholders will be fitted to your teeth, whilst the actual veneers are created. The veneers will be shaped, sized, and coloured so that once they are fitted to your teeth they will be indistinguishable from normal, white, healthy teeth.
Porcelain Crowns
Not to be confused with porcelain veneers, although they are manufactured from the same material, they look completely different, and serve several different purposes.
They are mostly known as a means to replace a lost tooth but there are more uses for them than that. Crowns can protect broken teeth, keep a fractured tooth in one piece, and can prevent a tooth from breaking apart completely.
Of course, there is always the point that we mentioned about crowns replacing missing teeth, and as such bringing your smile back to its full complement of teeth.
Enamel Contouring
This is a treatment that can be used to re-contour teeth that may be overlapping, not symmetrical, cracked, or chipped. In effect, it reshapes the tooth back to how it should have looked originally, and it can normally be done in just one visit. However, the effect is not immediate and therefore the recontouring of the tooth is a cumulative result, rather than an instant one.