What exactly is tooth decay?
Tooth decay are like termites in a wall. You don’t know they’re there until the wall collapses. And when the wall does collapse, it’s usually associated with pain, inconvenience and increased cost.
Tooth decay are essentially holes in the teeth caused by sugar. And it can be any kind of sugar – in liquid form or solid form.
The worst kinds of sugars for your teeth are sticky sugars, and wherever these sticky sugars or any sugars get caught, in the crevices in your teeth or between your teeth, it can start to cause decay. And decay is not something that stands still.
Decay is something that grows over time. And when it gets bigger and bigger and closer to the nerve inside the tooth, is when it starts to cause sensitivity and when it continues on even further, it can cause a severe toothache.
When it causes a severe toothache, that’s when the tooth either needs root canal treatment or extraction in order to deal with the pain. So, root canal treatment and extraction are either really expensive or annoying.
We don’t want to miss teeth if we can help it. Now they way we prevent it from getting to that point in its early stages, is by doing what’s called a restoration.
A restoration is when we remove all the decay, and replace the space with a tooth coloured material so that we can restore the original anatomy of the teeth so that it looks and feels good, and also preventing the decay from getting deeper within the tooth.
Hope that helps.
Dr Dan.