How Does a Dentist Fill a Cavity?

Series Summary

Many people today want a whiter, brighter smile. Some of us can achieve it with proper oral hygiene—regular brushing, flossing, and using mouthwash. Some of us need a little extra help to get our yellowing teeth to return to the land of sparkling white, especially us smokers and coffee drinkers. There are a number of products out there that will help turn our teeth a few shades whiter, including bleaching agents and toothpastes that contain whiteners. For some, these do the trick; for others, over the counter solutions are often hit and miss, with temporary results. In this free video series, a dentist provides dental health tips on preventing gum disease, nerve damage and abscessed teeth. Learn how dental procedures work, some facts on whitening toothpaste and how to fight gum disease. Discover home remedies, such as using peroxide and draining infections, as well as other preventative measures by following this information.

Video Transcript

"Today we are going to talk about what a cavity is. A cavity is basically a small dental infection of the tooth. It's usually comprised of bacteria and it's a bacterial infection that kind of occurs in different surfaces of the tooth. When caught very early it's usually not a very, painful procedure however, as it gets more advanced it can get closer and deeper down into the nerve and cause irritation such as hot cold sensitivity, biting sensitivity and gum tenderness. The way we treat a cavity is with what we call a filling and in order to do that we basically have to go in and remove the cavity make sure that the cavity has been removed and there's no more bacterial infection.Then we proceed on with the filling. In this model basically what we have is a designation of what a typical cavity would look like. When you are going around the mouth looking for cavities we are looking for basically dark heavy stains or anything that looks a little unusual. So here on this tooth we basically have this dark like basically highlighting an example of what a cavity looks like. This is on the second tooth on the very back on the upper right and what you are seeing is a very heavy stain with a little bit of cavity. Once we've identified that that's a cavity at that point that's when we decide that we are going to do a filling. So the first step in basically doing a filling is going in and basically numbing up or anesthetizing the patient. We do this in order to make the patient very comfortable so that when we go and remove the cavity it does not cause any irritation or annoyance to the patient. We'll take what we call our hand piece and basically go in there and lightly clean out the cavity like so. And basically once we've cleaned out the cavity, what we'll do next is go in with our instruments and basically check to ensure all the stain is removed and there isn't anything sticky or anything a little irritating to the tooth. Once we've verified that all the cavity has been cleaned out, the next step would be to actually do the filling. So what we do is we take our tooth colored filling material and we gently add it to the space were we had taken the cavity out. So again it's a very, it's a tooth colored material that typically blends very nice and very clean. So then we go through and lightly put our material right into the tooth and once we've have it filled we use a special light to set it up. Filling material start out very soft and in order to be able to mold them permanently to the tooth. Once it's been molded then we use a special light that when shined on the material it turns it very hard and makes it very strong. We'll put our light over top of the tooth that we did the filling and by activating the small button we actually initiate a light reaction that makes the material really hard. And that typically takes anywhere from twenty to thirty seconds depending on how big the cavity was and how thick the filling would be. Once that process has been completed the dentist will go back and check the filling to make sure that it's set up and it's hard. So what started out as a very soft is now very hard with the curing light. Once we've verified that the tooth has been filled the last step would be to go in and check the bite to ensure that the patient was not biting heavy or hard on this tooth. And that is pretty much a filling."