Treatments

If you have ever felt self-conscious about your teeth, or if you would like to improve your smile, then we at Shaw Village Dental Practice can help you.

We offer a comprehensive choice of cosmetic dental treatments that can solve a wide range of problems such as stained or discoloured teeth, chips, cracks and gaps, and crooked teeth. We can also provide you with a complete smile make-over to give you the smile you have always wanted.

Our treatments include:

• Tooth whitening
• White fillings and bonding in front teeth to help eradicate gaps, chips and cracks
• White fillings in back teeth instead of silver-coloured amalgam fillings
• Natural-looking porcelain crowns to restore more broken-down teeth
• Bridges to invisibly replace missing teeth
• Dental Homeopathy

We will always do our best to explain during your appointment why you need treatment and what different options you have available to you so you can make an informed choice. However, we do appreciate that it is difficult to remember everything we have told you, so this section of our website is aimed at giving you some basic information about why procedures are needed and how they are carried out. If you have any further questions, please get in touch – we’ll be happy to help.

Tooth Whitening
Tooth whitening is a great way of giving your smile a boost, erasing stains caused by tea, coffee, red wine and smoking and helping you to look younger by making your teeth look whiter and brighter.

At Shaw Village, we offer a professional take-home whitening treatment. We provide you with whitening gel and custom-made trays (a little like mouthguards), and show you how to use them. You can then complete the treatment in the comfort of your own home at a time convenient to you. Within just a couple of weeks your smile will be brighter and you could be smiling with confidence.

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Bonding
Bonding is another name for white fillings in the front teeth which are used as a relatively simple method of disguising small defects such as chipped or crooked teeth or gaps between teeth.

The procedure involves preparing your teeth with an etching solution which we simply paint on, and then applying the tooth-coloured filling material (resin) to your teeth. We carefully shape the resin to give it a natural appearance, and bond it into place. This procedure does not usually need a local anaesthetic.

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Veneers
Veneers offer a great way of transforming your smile with just one treatment. They are very thin porcelain veneers which are specially adhered to the front of your teeth. Because they cover the whole front surface, they can hide many imperfections, from discoloured, chipped or cracked teeth through to mis-aligned ones.

The teeth are prepared by taking a thin layer of enamel (less than 1mm) from the surface, and we take an impression, or mould, of the area.

The veneers are created in our dental laboratory by skilled craftsmen, and are then bonded into place giving you a beautiful, natural-looking smile.

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Fillings
Fillings are one of the most basic methods of restoring teeth. They do exactly what their name suggests – they fill a hole in the tooth that has been caused by decay, playing an important role in helping us to keep a tooth for many more years.

At Shaw Village Dental Practice, we use the most effective, modern, tooth-coloured materials. These look very natural, so no-one will be able to tell you have them.

We will usually numb the tooth and its surrounding area with a local anaesthetic, and will drill the decayed material from the tooth.

When the decay has been removed, the tooth will be filled. For tooth-coloured fillings, the material is placed into the hole in layers, with a special light being shone on each layer to speed up the setting process.

We will then shape the filling, so that it looks as realistic as possible, and so it does not interfere with the way your teeth meet when you bite and chew.

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Root Canal Treatment
We usually recommend root canal treatment when the pulp of the tooth becomes infected, either through decay or injury. The pulp is the soft bit inside the tooth, and runs right through the root, carrying the nerve supply and nutrients. When it becomes infected, that infection can spread throughout the root canal system of the tooth, and can cause an abscess which is usually extremely painful.

If left untreated the infection can lead to damage around the bone of the tooth, and the tooth is likely to have to be removed.

Root canal treatment can be quite lengthy. The area we are treating is very small, so it takes a lot of skill and experience to carry out the procedure.

During the first visit we will need to remove the infected pulp. We numb the tooth and the surrounding area first so that you do not feel any pain, and then use special tiny tools to take the pulp away.

The tooth will need to settle down, so we will give it a temporary filling. Sometimes the filling material will include medication to help to destroy any germs and prevent further infection.

On your next visit we will examine the tooth to ensure that the infection has cleared properly, and will replace the temporary filling with a permanent one. Sometimes a filling will be all you will need, but often the root canal treatment weakens the tooth and it will need strengthening with a crown.

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Crowns
A dental crown fits over the remaining part of a tooth, helping to strengthen it and making it look like a whole, natural tooth once more.

There are a number of reasons why we may recommend them. Your tooth may be very decayed and not strong enough to be filled any more, the top part of the tooth may have been accidentally damaged, or you may need one following root canal treatment. Crowns are also sometimes needed to help support a dental bridge.

We will numb your tooth and the area around it so we can prepare your tooth, and will take an impression, or mould, of the area. We will also take a note of the natural shade of your teeth.

These will be used by skilled technicians at a dental laboratory to create a crown which fits and matches your other teeth perfectly.

While the crown is being made, you will be fitted with a temporary one. Once your new crown is ready – usually within two weeks – we will fit it and bond it firmly into place.

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Bridges
Bridges are a permanent and realistic looking way of filling a gap between teeth that has been caused by one or more missing teeth.

A bridge is an appliance which holds one or more false teeth on it. Unlike a denture, it is permanently held in place by the teeth next to it. It is usually made of a precious metal base such as gold, with tooth-coloured porcelain bonded to any visible areas to make it look natural.

Often, the two neighbouring teeth – one on each side – will need to have crowns fixed onto them to strengthen them. The two crowns are then joined together by placing the false tooth between them and cementing them in place. This is known as a fixed bridge.

Sometimes adhesive bridges can be constructed. These have a lot less impact on the neighbouring teeth because the latest bonding techniques are used to hold the false tooth in place.

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Dentures
Denture wearing is no longer the ordeal it used to be. Modern techniques mean they fit far better than they used to, and look far more realistic too. They are ideally suited to people with a number of missing teeth.

Even if you have lost all your teeth, you will still need to visit us regularly to ensure that your dentures still fit properly, and also so we can check for signs of oral disease, including mouth cancer. You also still need to care for your mouth, brushing your gums, tongue and palate daily as well as cleaning your dentures thoroughly.

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Tooth Extractions
Many people have to have a tooth removed at some time in their lives. This can be for a number of reasons. Some people have overcrowded mouths, and have some teeth removed as part of their orthodontic (teeth straightening) treatment. Sometimes teeth become too badly decayed or damaged to be repaired, and need to be extracted. Gum disease can, in its later stages, cause teeth to become so loose that they have to be taken out. And some people have to have their wisdom teeth removed, usually because they are growing in the wrong direction and are causing problems.

The procedure for removing a tooth is relatively simple from a patient’s perspective. We will numb your tooth and the surrounding area with local anaesthetic, so you won’t feel any pain. We will then hold the tooth firmly, and will ease it out. There will be some bleeding, but we will place a gauze pad in the tooth socket to help stop the bleeding. We will generally ask you to bite gently on this padding for about half an hour, after which you can take it out and throw it away.

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Mouthguards
Mouthguards are an essential part of a sports kit these days, both for children and adults, particularly for contact sports such as rugby, boxing and martial arts, and those involving moving objects such as hockey, lacrosse and cricket.

We can provide custom-made mouthguards which fit comfortably and snugly, offering the maximum possible protection for your teeth.

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Dental Homeopathy
Our dentist Brigitte Wilkinson has been interested in Homeopathy for some years and had the opportunity to study and gain a Primary Healthcare Certificate, the LFHom (Dent) qualification in 2004.

Homeopathy is a therapeutic treatment which uses the principle that ‘like cures like’. The medicines or remedies are prepared in a certain way and this gives them their mode of action. Minute doses are produced which stimulate the body’s own natural forces of recovery. The remedies are safe to use for everyone, from very young children to adults, and can be used alongside conventional medicines.

There are several homeopathic medicines that are very useful in dentistry – Aconite for anxiety, Arnica and Hypericum following surgery or tooth extraction, Hepar Sulph for infection. Mouth ulcers and cold sores, teething and toothache can also be helped with homeopathy.

We are happy to discuss your requirements and provide you with more information at the practice. You may also like to visit www.bhda.co.uk for further details about dental homeopathy.

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