What To Expect From Biomimetic Dentistry
Traditional dental techniques haven’t taken advantage of the advanced ceramics and adhesives developed by modern engineering and science. These new technologies allow dentists to use smaller onlays that work more like your own teeth than the large fillings and crowns used in traditional dentistry. Traditional techniques are also more prone to causing teeth to crack and leak thereby allowing bacteria to rot your teeth away from the inside and underneath fillings and crowns.
Nonetheless, everything we do in dentistry can wear out or fail over time – just like our own teeth do. Yet most patients are concerned that failures of the restoration are always the fault of the dentist although when their own natural tooth breaks it is considered an accident. In fact the reason why the tooth was restored in the first place was because the natural tooth had become weakened, broken, or decayed. Biomimetic Dentistry allows for this eventuality by making the restoration the “weakest link”, and its failure an easily repairable situation. Compare that to making the tooth the “weakest link” that results in the eventual catastrophic failure of the tooth itself meaning further cracking, fracturing, need for root canal treatment, and eventual loss of the tooth.
Biomimetic Dentistry is also not about drilling the tooth less, but it’s about preserving more of the hard sound tooth structure. The use of modern adhesion dentistry techniques does not rely on the standard retention and resistant forms that require more drilling on a tooth to do fillings and crowns as taught in dental schools. The long-term success of the adhesion is the relationship between the strength of the bond and the force of the stress that it’s resisting. So a dentist experienced in balancing and adjusting your bite is essential when doing Biomimetic dental restorations.
