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The Santa Barbara Family Dentistry team understands the toll decayed, broken, and missing teeth can take on your smile, confidence, and quality of life.
Thankfully, your Santa Maria dentists have the vast knowledge, education, and experience it takes to restore your smile and oral health. Using advanced technology, they can restore missing and damaged teeth with materials that look, feel, and function just like natural teeth.
In addition to impacting your smile and self- confidence, not treating damaged teeth can result in a whole host of other issues, including:
Visiting your dentist for restorative dental treatment in Santa Maria can help you avoid these outcomes – especially if you visit your dentist as soon as possible. The earlier we can catch a dental problem, the less complex the restorative process will be for you (and the less expensive).
Your Santa Maria dentist can treat broken, chipped, cracked, decayed, and missing teeth with a variety of procedures. These include:
While our ultimate goal is to preserve your natural dentition, there are instances when a tooth is too damaged to repair. Doing so would not only be futile, but it would also be irresponsible and unethical.
For instance, if a patient has significant decay that has destroyed most of the tooth’s structure, we cannot simply remove the decay and fill the tooth. The remaining tooth structure would not be strong enough to support a large filling. It wouldn’t be long before the pressure from chewing or bruxism (clenching and grinding your teeth) would result in a fractured tooth that would need either root canal treatment, a build-up, and a dental crown or need to be extracted and replaced with a bridge or implant.
Filling the tooth would cost you more in the long run and be a disservice. Instead, our team would likely recommend a dental crown to help support the tooth and give it added strength. However, if a tooth is too damaged to save and an extraction is the only option, we can restore your smile and keep your bite aligned through advanced prosthetics. These include:
The cost of treatment from your Santa Maria dentist depends on the type and extent of treatment needed. One filling will cost significantly less than an implant-supported denture, for example.
Once your dentist has completed your custom treatment plan, our front office team will discuss:
Most insurance companies will pay a portion of restorative dental procedures – some offer up to 80% coverage (until you reach your annual maximum, of course). Others offer 50% to 70%. Talk to your insurance provider for more information. Our team is also ready to help you make sense of your dental coverage.
We understand how scary it can be to get a dental diagnosis that requires restorative treatment. But please be assured that we will do all we can to make you feel comfortable and confident in the treatment you choose to pursue. With restorative dentistry in Santa Maria, we can restore your beautiful smile, proper function of your teeth and jaw, and oral health.
Contact us to schedule a consultation. We look forward to seeing you!
