Fillings - A Guided Tour

After not having gone to the dentist for two and a half years, I had discovered that I needed to get a few fillings. Today I got two of them in the area between my upper right bicuspids (premolars). And I'm going to need fillings for the same teeth on the left side. Darn. I hadn't had any dental problems since I got in my adult teeth. At least this allowed me to get a guided tour of dental restoration. Yay. I held a mirror to see what he was doing as he explained why he was doing it.

First I got a shot of anesthesia. You might say, no pain, no gain. I say no pain, shut up. Using a couple drills made of different alloys, the dentist drilled into my teeth to remove areas of decay/demineralization, which look white and porous. This left my teeth with gaps *sad face* and it was time for some dental reconstruction. But before adding the resin, my dentist added a layer of fluoride, which is good for slowing down decay (it's in our drinking water and helps strengthen enamel). He claimed that not all dentist applies it because it takes extra time (albeit small) and that it costs them more to do it because they can't charge for it.

To create a proper toothlike shape, a metal band was placed around my tooth to serve as a "mold" for applying the filling. Then this bluish acid was used to etch the surface of tooth to allow for micromechanical bonding with the resin. This is different from chemical bonding.

The composite resin was then applied in little dabs and shaped. The resin has a built in catalyst that apparently is activate by light of low wavelength, so after each dab, a blue light was shined on it to harden the resin. Once all the resin was applied, further shaping and smoothing was done. The smoother the surface is, the better it does to prevent bacteria from settling on it.

So that's pretty much the entire procedure. The dentist actually modified my biting surface. My teeth are more triangular than they should be, such that my upper bicuspids come into a tiny point of contact with each other on their outer edges. Unfortunately, this leads to food being more easily pushed into the space between the two teeth. The resin was used to create a little more contact surface to reduce the amount of food that gets trapped.

Regular flossing would've removed stuck food particles and help prevent tooth decay, so it's made me a little bit more gung ho about flossing. But anyway, the procedure was relatively painless. The filling I got is composite resin, which is a mixture of powdered glass and plastic resin, so it is tooth colored and unnoticeable. The only nuisance is that the resin doesn't last forever, about 10-15 years, so I'll have to go back and restore the fillings in the future.