White fillings Wimbledon are more popular than ever becoming a mainstay of the clinic’s workload at least when it comes to restorative care! Let’s find out more about how they are done and why?
Traditional fillings or the ones that come to mind most rapidly are silver white metal amalgam fillings. They have a very long history in dentistry but are far from the first; they themselves are actually replacements to gold fillings. This is both an attempt to have a cheaper fully functioning, more hard-wearing long lasting filing that would require significantly less maintenance.
Metal amalgam as a health risk?
There has been some controversy around silver metal amalgam but in normal temperatures and conditions (short of being inside a furnace!) amalgam fillings are stable and safe. But this has not altered many patients wanting to change them for newer resin-based fillings. Unless they are loose or decay has set in underneath them, there is unlikely to be any medical need to disturb them. But newer resin-based fillings do look far more natural and can be blended in with the surrounding tooth in a way that has never been possible with silver amalgam. So they should be considered an aesthetic cosmetic choice rather than a medical need.
UV cured resins
What has made such realistic and hard-wearing white fillings Wimbledon possible has been the ever-growing use of UV cured resins in dentistry. They have several excellent properties both as an excellent adhesive holding traditional prosthetics in place but also as a material that can be built with itself, by curing the resin in layers to form much larger structures. These can then be sculpted with drills and buffed and polished like normal enamel into their final forms.
Resins find themselves being implemented in a wide range of restorations, from subtle chips all the way up to in situ resin crowns, where an entire compromised tooth is coated in multiple resin layers; somewhere between the two is composite fillings. So the next time you see the distinctive blue light of a UV lamp shining in somebody’s mouth at a dental surgery, you’ll know why and don’t be too surprised if in the not too distant future you find yourself making use of UV resin technologies in a dental procedure.
Thermal expansion
When it comes to prosthetics, size and shape have always been critical; too loose and a prosthetic would rattle, too tight and it would cause pain- this is true in dentistry. But people’s mouths experience a greater range of temperatures as opposed to most of their highly regulated bodies, jumping into the high 90’s with hot coffee or down into the – 5 with ice cream. This creates a change of thermal expansion; when a material that fits perfectly at body temperature wishes to expand at higher temperatures but as it is surrounded by a tooth, it simply cannot expand without applying pressure to the enamel and dentine which it is embedded in. But white fillings Wimbledon are formed of long polymers with little-to-no thermal expansion rather than silvers and golds.