Dental Bridge
Making It Beautiful
When you've lost a tooth that shows when you smile, it can be emotionally traumatic.
However, new technology enables us to make a tooth replacement that looks and feels like
the real thing. If you want your dental bridge to look perfectly natural, choose a dentist who is
schooled in these new techniques.There are three basic ways to fix a missing tooth. To read a discussion on the three
options, please see our page on missing teeth. This page will
deal with one of those options - a fixed dental bridge. The other two options are a
dental implant or a
removable denture,
which can be either a full denture or a
partial denture.
The principal technique we use to get bridgework to look natural is the
ovate pontic.
This is a technical term for a method of creating the illusion that the tooth is growing
out of your gum. There aren't many dentists yet who use this technique, outside of those
who are trained in cosmetic dentistry. However, use of the ovate pontic technique is
required of cosmetic dentistry specialists who are taking their accreditation exam.
When an ovate pontic is used as part of a dental bridge, the site where the false tooth is
placed is sculpted with an electrosurgical device prior to placing it. This creates the
illusion that the tooth is growing up from the ridge. That technique has been used in the
photographs below right and at the bottom of this page to give the lateral incisors in
each case such a stunningly realistic appearance. This is
work that was done by Dr. David Hall, author of this site.
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Here is a photograph of teeth prepared for bridgework,
with the sculpted ovate pontic site. |
Here are the same teeth, with the bridge in place. This
type of bridgework creates the illusion that the tooth is growing out of the gum, when it
is actually a false tooth. Work performed by Dr. Hall. |
We have a photograph of another
beautiful
dental bridge placed by Dr. Thomas Dudney, one of our
Alabama cosmetic dentists.
Here is another case of a very
natural-looking bridge. This work was performed by Dr. Steve Gorman of North
Oaks, Minnesota, one of our mynewsmile.com network dentists. In this case he has
placed an all-ceramic bridge combined with porcelain veneers on the remaining
front teeth. Notice how absolutely natural-looking the final result is.
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click on the
picture to see a
full face view |
Click
here for more information about Minnesota cosmetic dentist Dr. Steve Gorman.
Click here to visit his office web
site.
Sometimes a patient's jawbone has shrunk and an ovate
pontic isn't practical. In the hands of an expert cosmetic dentist, the patient
can also get a beautiful bridge.
The same ovate pontic design is used below in another type - the Encore®
bridge. Please see our Encore® bridge page for more information.
The Encore® bridge is conservative - that is, not much of the surrounding teeth has to be drilled away,
and it is extremely esthetic, as you will see from the photographs.
More dental bridge information:
Read more about
dental bridges in the
posts on our cosmetic dentistry blog.
A Maryland bridge is
similar to the Encore®, but it has a
framework made of metal, which causes some esthetic problems.
A dental flipper
is the least expensive tooth replacement you can get. Sometimes it is used
as a temporary dental bridge.
