Dental Info

  Patients often come into the NY University School of Dentistry where I teach to treat their dental emergencies. They often have a particular symptom that is bothering them. The students often want to address the symptom immediately, but often they are required, in non emergency situations, to first do a comprehensive exam and treatment plan.  It is not usual for these new patients at the school to initially express a resistance to taking a full set of radiographs and submitting to a full work up by their student. Often their student also wants to immediately care for the tooth thats bothering them, but our student dentists need to understand the importance of  performing a complete patient assessment prior to performing non emergency dental treatments.   Many problems that patients have are not terribly symptomatic, at least until that time when their conditions worsens and they are forced to seek "emergency care". For this reason and others, most of our...

 Traditionally dentists have been trained to provide a chamfer or shoulder of 1 mm if possible. For smaller teeth .75 mm might have been used in order to not overly weaken the remaining tooth structure. This amount of reduction was advisable because most of the crowns made were porcelain fused to metal crowns that needed this reduction to make room for both metal and porcelain materials. With the advent of adhesive dentistry, some dentists (myself included) used more minimal reduction strategies for anterior teeth. After all, only a .5 mm chamfer or shoulder is necessary to fabricate bonded feldspathic crowns. More reduction was needed where the restoration would be in occlusion, but at the neck of the prep restorative material is not under as much stress and shouldn't need as much thickness.While esthetics can sometimes dictate a greater reduction (especially in the case of a darker stump shade), most of the time .5-.75 reduction is all that is necessary.   Another ...

 This is a somewhat strange tittle for a dental blog post, but more and more, when I examine my patients mouths I often feel like a gardener examining the flowering plants and shrubs that he has taken care of for years. My patients mouths, especially those who follow my recommendations have done quite well and even though many are over 70, they have retained most or all of their teeth. Alright, I should admit that I am fortunate to be practicing in Manhattan and many of my patients are relatively affluent compared to others. They feel like they can afford to come in frequently for recall and restore their teeth according to my recommendations.  Although treating caries and performing restorative dental procedures are part of my practice, education and preventive dentistry play a larger role in maintaining my patients oral health. I encourage all my patients to use an electric tooth brush, clean interproximally and have at least two cleanings per year. For many patients oral ...