//Dental Blog//

Recent dental implant case studies

Andy Fennell | Aesthetic Dentistry, Cosmetic Dentistry, Dental Implants | Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Dental implants are an increasingly popular choice for my patients as I’ve been doing a lot of them recently.

So I thought it was about time I posted a few case studies. Here they are:

Tooth replacement and smile makeover: Case Study

A full set of replacement teeth: Case Study

Implant retained dentures: Case Study

I’d love to hear what you think - or if you have any questions about dental implants at all, please do post something in the comment box below.

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Closing gaps between teeth

Andy Fennell | Aesthetic Dentistry, Cosmetic Dentistry, General Dentistry, White Fillings | Thursday, June 11th, 2009

I thought it worth jotting a few words down about this one - it’s such a common problem for people, and frankly so easily fixed (without breaking the bank)!

Here at Winning Smiles we’ve been closing gaps between teeth for years, using our Italian composite-filling system (the same white filling system we use for tooth decay) - see our best white fillings blog article.

The beauty of using ‘Cosmetic bonding’ with a top class tooth-coloured filling system (like Enamel Plus) is that:

the teeth don’t need to be cut or ground down;
it’s over and done with in one visit (no waiting for crowns or veneers to come back from the lab);
it’s painless, really, I don’t even use anaesthetic for this technique!

So what are the drawbacks?

Nothing too serious really, I recommend having them polished once or twice a year to maintain their ‘lustre’ and I usually do the polishing during routine 6 month examination appointments (at no extra charge).

They can get chipped/broken, but so can veneers, the difference is that these bonded build-ups can be repaired seamlessly (chipped veneers have to be replaced completely).

And all for around £400. Something worth talking about? In fact, it’s such a popular treatment I don’t know why I haven’t mentioned it before!

Here’s an example of the before and after pictures:

gap in teeth

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Are your teeth stained on the inside?

Andy Fennell | Teeth Whitening | Thursday, June 4th, 2009

Many people are familiar with the techniques used to whiten teeth from the outside, but I doubt many of you know that discoloured teeth can also be bleached from the inside, out!

There are times when the teeth are discoloured from within rather than from run of the mill red wine and coffee stains on the outside. It usually involves one or two front teeth (upper or lower) that have been root-filled in the past and have become severely discoloured (brown, yellow or orange).

When these badly discoloured teeth are combined with a generalised yellow appearance of the other teeth (from years of staining) this makes for the hand-over-mouth, or lip over teeth, smile that so many patients seem to put up with.

Standard dental bleaching involves either using trays at home or a special light source used in the dental chair (see my teeth whitening blog for views on which works best). However it is also possible to bleach the inside of these very dark (root-filled) teeth, and at Winning Smiles we use a technique that combines both bleaching the outside of all the teeth and bleaching the inside of those extra-orange ones. The results are quite spectacular and often avoids the need for drilling and crowning these individual problem-teeth.

In the photo, two of these front teeth were ‘off-the-scale’ orange, the rest were just a creamy shade of yellow from normal staining. The patient had 10 days to go before his dream wedding in the caribbean. This is how he looked after a week of Inside-Out-Bleaching. Can you tell which ones used to be orange?

inside out bleaching

If you look really closely, two of the teeth are whiter than the others - yep, you guessed it, those are the ones that were orange a week ago!

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Perfect smile not required

Andrew | Aesthetic Dentistry, General Dentistry | Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Someone came to the surgery the other day, and this happens a fair bit, they apologised for their teeth.

It reminded me that I should put ’something on the website’ about this, as we’re really not here to judge anyone and people should not feel the need to be embarrassed (even if it is human nature).