When dental restoration involves replacing teeth, our dentist in Marylebone can make a seamless addition to your smile by using the latest technology and advanced training.

With restorative dentistry, we always attempt to repair and reconstruct before replacing teeth. There really is nothing like your natural tooth, and even if it cannot be completely saved, as much healthy enamel and dentine as possible will be retained during a restoration process. But even with our best efforts, there are some scenarios where teeth have to be removed, and this can leave a gap in your smile.

We are very well equipped to meet any prosthodontic needs (prosthetic teeth) ranging from a full set of dentures to a small prosthetic inlay (a fragment of porcelain that is bonded flush to the surface of part of a tooth, usually the top surface of molars).

Let’s take a closer look at our most common fixed oral prosthetics.

Crowns

Crowns have been around for a long time, and at Plowman and Partners, we are well-versed in both the most well-known of crowns, which is made of a gold alloy, and the most aesthetically subtle of crowns, polymer composite hybrid crowning.

Over the decades, there has been a shift in the philosophy behind crowning. It was common to remove a substantial quantity of the natural tooth as any remaining tooth would significantly reduce the lifespan of the crown and also obscure it once the crown had been fitted. This has flipped towards trying to preserve as much of the natural tooth as possible, and instead of shaving down the tooth to a peg, crowns have been designed to fit around the remaining tooth. We use detailed digital scanning techniques to record the shape of the remaining tooth before having a crown fabricated that will fit like a glove. This allows our dentist in Marylebone to save more of our patient’s natural teeth, whilst at the same time, we use surgical microscopes to be certain that we have accurately removed any residual decay.

Bridges

Bridges have also altered over the lifespan of our practice. We still regularly carry out the traditional wired bridges; these are multiple crowns, and up to 3 are grouped on a structure and wired onto the adjacent teeth. However, we do this with great caution by taking x-rays of the surrounding teeth and being mindful of the additional pressure and risk put on them by having to support the bridge.

The real progress in bridgework has been their pairing with dental implants. By using a pair of dental implants to work as the endpoints for the bridge, there is no stress put on the adjacent teeth (assuming that the jaw is healthy). Therefore, this can be an excellent alternative with a much longer lifespan than wired crowns.

Always moving forward

We’ve always kept up with the times in our clinic. With our emphasis on proper staff training, skills development and the use of new technologies, our dentist in Marylebone will always have great ways of providing restorative care.