Dental Bridges

When we do a dental bridge, we have a tooth on either side of a space where one or more teeth are missing. So we simply, as if you were building a bridge over a road, you put a connector on one side and the connector on the other, and you put the road over that. On a dental bridge, we're simply connecting to the tooth behind the missing teeth and to the one in front of the empty space. And it's basically all one piece of porcelain and it slides over the two teeth, cemented in, it's permanent, you eat with it, you chew with it, you floss underneath it. Those are some skills that we teach you when we cement a permanent bridge. The benefits of a fixed dental bridge are that once you leave the office with your permanent restoration, you're done. Well, the first thing we would do is determine what you needed and why you needed it. If a patient comes in specifically asking about a bridge, I usually will tell them the first thing I want to do, instead of focusing on a few trees, I'd like to look at the whole forest first. So we do a all-around exam. And then we'll talk about treatment plans different procedures, different materials, and come up with a plan together. Then generally it's just two appointments. The first appointment we administer anesthetic or get you numb, prep the teeth, clean up any diseased areas or damaged areas, do our digital scan, then we fabricate temporary crowns or bridges that cover the teeth. You'll wear that for a period of about two weeks. And at the second appointment, we simply have you come in and we pop the temporaries off, slide the restoration on, do the famous tap, tap, tap, and make sure that the bite is good and make sure the patient likes the looks of the restoration. And then we'd simply cement it to the teeth, teach you the care and feeding instructions of how to floss and how to take care of it, and out the door, you go.