Dental Fillings
- Dental restorations (aka fillings) are used to treat broken, chipped, fractured, decayed, worn or cracked teeth.
- At Lamantia Dental we use ‘white’ or tooth-coloured composite resin materials to restore your teeth. Our materials are able to colour match and blend into your natural tooth shade!
- This allows us to restore form and function for continued aesthetics and chewing ability. After all, what is life without your favourite foods!
- We can also use white filling materials to adjust / change the aesthetics of the front teeth easily before committing to more costly crown / veneer options.
FAQs
Do you still use metal fillings?
No. Due to the environmental issues with amalgam waste/disposal, metal fillings are being phased out worldwide.
How long will my dental fillings last?
There is no way to guarantee how long a dental filling will last. However, fillings that are properly placed, maintained and cleaned can last 10 years or more. Any plaque or calculus build-up around fillings will increase the risk of recurrent decay and restoration failure.
Some patients have extremely heavy bite forces or their jaws come together traumatically that can cause both teeth and fillings to break or fracture.
Why do my old fillings look dull?
Like anything else, filling material ages and can become dull overtime with normal wear and tear. This often presents as loss of surface gloss or staining around the margins of the fillings.
This can sometimes be buffed out, other times requires the replacement of the restoration.
I want my old metal fillings replaced, can you do that?
Old amalgam fillings can last a lifetime, but can be unsightly as well. In most cases a well sealed, functioning metal filling should be left alone.
Other times old metal fillings often have cracking around them that has weakened to underlying tooth, these should be removed and replaced with full coverage crowns to best protect the tooth.
Is it true that metal filling leach mercury into my body?
No. there has been a lot of mass media hysteria about metal fillings in the past. There is mercury in metal fillings, but it is trapped in a metal alloy and not freely leaching out of the tooth. Mercury exposure actually increasing with unnecessary removal and replacement.
There is more mercury in a can of tuna than gets released from metal fillings during normal function