Tooth Fillings in Cincinnati, OH

So with any sort of tooth filling, any cavity that you have, we don't do the silver fillings anymore here office. We do all of the white-colored composite fillings. For smaller fillings, smaller cavities, we'll clean that out and put a tooth-colored composite in. If it happens to be a little bit bigger than what we think just a regular filling can fix, we'll do what we call an onlay, and what that is is we'll clean all the decay out, shape the tooth how we want it, and we actually send it to a lab, and a lab sends us back a little puzzle piece that fits right in.

The benefit of that being it's a stronger material than the composite, and a lab can shape it perfectly so that you hopefully won't need anything later down the road. We do also do crowns here, so if it's decay that's taken up more of the tooth structure than we like to see, we'll do a crown, which is we make that whole tooth a little bit smaller, basically put a hat on top of it. So, onlays and crowns can either be tooth-colored or gold.

Well, at first I came here because my current dentist at the time could not perform the services that I needed. I was reading that old mercury fillings in your teeth are unsafe. They're toxic. And I wanted to have them removed. So I asked my dentist if he would do it, and he said he didn't recommend it. And I said, ‘Well, can you do it?’ He said, ‘Yes. I can remove them.’ I said, ‘Well, I read that there's a safe way to do it.’ You have to do it with rubber dam, and you vacuum, and there's a way to safely take the mercury out of your teeth. He said he didn't do that any longer and that he recommended that I find a younger, more modern dentist to do that.

I went called the American ... I think the American Dental Association. And I recommended, could they recommend someone who was newly out of dental school, more modern up on the techniques of what I wanted done. And they gave me Maggie's name.

So I called here and set up an appointment. Told them what I needed. They completely understood why I wanted the mercury fillings removed. They had all the modern equipment to do it. The safe procedures, the vacuum, the rubber dam to do it, so you wouldn't get toxicity from the mercury as it came out. And then they replace it with safe fillings, and that's really what I want to do. That's what brought me here. They did a wonderful job. Her assistant, Ernie, was amazing. And she was amazing, too. So very happy with that. And so I just stayed ever since.

So, getting fillings is a pretty routine procedure here. A lot of people have had a cavity at some point in their life, and this really is important to get taken care of before it becomes a painful situation. Some patients notice it just as a little bit of sensitivity. They're not really sure what's going on. We can use our X-rays to help diagnose that. We also have a little instrument called the DIAGNOdent, and that'll give us a reading.

We will get the decay out of the tooth. We place a tooth-colored filling. I've had patients, 'Oh, I don't want more silver in my mouth.' We won't put that. We'll put a tooth-colored filling there, make sure that your bite's very comfortable, and that will prevent the decay from going any further, and your tooth is back to being in good health.