the simple blog

Saw a patient today with excellent home care.  Here's someone who knows how to brush and floss.

Notice how the gums wrap tightly to the teeth like spandex.  Note the bright coral pink color.  (people of darker skin may have harmless patches of pigmentation in covering some of the pink areas)  They are not red and puffy from gingivitis, and they do not bleed when prodded with dental probes or floss.  This is what your gums can look like if you take great care of them with daily flossing and brushing.  It doesn't matter if you're 9 or 99, it can look like this.

A legal analysis of the healthcare reform bill has found language that imposes a tax on medical appliances that likely applies to dental appliances as well.  These could include crowns, implants, brides, dentures, orthodontic brackets, retainers, nightguards and more.

In the current issue of the CDA Journal, Dr. Bradley Lewis calls for a worldwide ban on formocresol, a dental medicament commonly on children during pulpotomies (baby root canals).    We have never stocked this at our practice, and after reading this thorough literature review, we never will.  All the component ingredients are carcinogenic, and what's worse, we place it DIRECTLY on the live inner cells of your child's teeth, where it's free to circulate throughout the body.  I call on all dentists to stop using this cheap, outmoded, smelly substance and put our pediatric patients' health above our supply costs.     MTA, ferric sulfate, and calcium hydroxide are all alternatives, with MTA having the most clinical success.

This is the first comparison case I am doing to test a new crown technology. Glidewell Labs has a new type of crown for back teeth made out of zirconia, a high strength ceramic. Like gold crowns, they are virtually unbreakable, don't require a lot of tooth height. Unlike gold crowns, they are tooth colored.

Many people know about 3M's Lava crowns. They are porcelain fused to zirconia. They are beautiful in the front, but they are expensive to produce, and the porcelain is relatively fracture prone. Few problems on front teeth, but using them on high-load molars is risky; I've actually had a couple of them break myself. In every documented case of failure, (I'm talking the published clinical studies) the outer porcelain breaks off, leaving the inner zirconia intact. So the folks at Glidewell decided to make the entire crown out of zirconia.

The FDA just released an updated statement declaring that amalgam is safe and effective as a filling material.  While we routinely place white, composite resin fillings, Dr. Le keeps amalgam around for the specific (and very rare) situations where it's still the filling material of choice.  It is Dr. Le's position that amalgam is a safe, viable, long lasting material when used properly in the right situations.  Amalgam is also a necessary material to maintain the low cost and higher availability of dentistry to underserved populations, such as inner city or rural free clinics.  We invite all our patients to discuss the pros and cons of the different fillings with us at their next visit.  There is NO such thing as a perfect filling material.  Read on for a comparison of amalgam and silver filling materials.

An Ohio local news station has found lead in a dental crown that was outsourced to China.   We take a brief look at this sensational story, and examine your personal risk.  Let's separate the facts from the fears.

The size of the needle makes no difference in the level of perceived injection pain, reports a study from General Dentistry, the Academy of General Dentistry's journal.  Here are some practical ways to make the dreaded injection less unpleasant.

Amalgam is highly unpopular in our practice, but silver fillings are still placed by many dentists, particularly in lower income areas.  The American Dental Association claims that banning amalgam would increase government spending, while decreasing options for the poor.

This is a loaded question that makes some large assumptions:

• you need a crown - we've had a lot of "crown" patients end up needing no treatment at all, or just fillings.  A diagnosis for a crown should be supported by clinical findings or symptoms.
• crowns are commodities, which means a crown is basically the same no matter where you get it from.

A lot of people think that a crown is a crown, and a cleaning is a cleaning.  If all crowns are equal, why not go to Mexico or Eastern Europe for your dentistry?  You wouldn't, because there is a vast difference in the finish of the dental work, and quality of the materials used, and the time and care that is put into the experience