Say NO To Crack!

OK, Picture this. It's a hot and sweltering summer day. You have been working in the yard all afternoon and you are sweating and your lovely wife brings you a tall refreshing ice cold glass of tea, you toss down your rake and grab the glass and just as you start to take a drink, cold hits a tooth and instead of your thirst being quenched you feel like an ice pick is being stabbed into your tooth. Or maybe you are sitting down to watch a movie and you have a cup of milk and a plate of cookies and just as you get into a drama filled moment and take a bite of a cookie some of that sugar hits one tooth and suddenly you feel a sharp shooting pain that last longer than a Hollywood marriage. These are signs that a tooth may have a crack. A crack in a tooth is usually microscopic but to the germs in your mouth is may as well be the Grand Canyon and they take the opportunity to zip into the crack and wreak havoc. This commonly happens in teeth that have metal fillings. The metal expands and contracts with hot and cold (coffee and ice cream anyone?) Soon enough it doesn't have any room to expand anymore and it cracks! But if the cracks are microscopic and you can't see them with the naked eye, and even if you have an x-ray taken you can't see any sign of damage until the damage is quite large how do you know it's there? I have heard dentists say that cracked teeth is one of the most difficult problems to diagnose. They may just listen to your symptoms and then try to duplicate the pain you are describing (yikes!) yet Dr. Parkin doesn't seem to have any trouble finding these cracks. What is the difference between these dentists and Dr. Parkin. It is not that he eats lots of carrots and has perfect eyesight, it is because he uses an Intra-oral Camera.


The intra-oral camera has several benefits; it allows you as the patient to actually see what is happening in your own mouth and it allows Dr. Parkin to see a tooth magnified 30 times the actual size. That should help with seeing cracks, don't you think?





So, if you have a crack in a tooth what are the options for fixing it. If you catch it early enough you can have the old filling removed, the decay that is underneath removed and replace it with a composite (tooth colored) filling. Dr. Parkin doesn't use any metal fillings and hasn't since "When Doves Cry" was the number one song in the nation *1984* If you wait a bit longer, then the old filling and decay can be removed but the tooth may need a crown, and if you wait and wait and wait you can still have it fixed (although not cheaply) because small cavities turn into big cavities and eventually turn into root canals and then also need crowns. So, like most things, find the problem early and take care of it quickly!





Now, I know you are dying to see some cracked teeth--so at the top of the page there are some "before" pictures of teeth that we have fixed in our office. See if you can spot the cracks in them!