Phoenix Cosmetic Dentist

Quality cosmetic dentistry at an affordable price. You deserve to look your best! Cosmetic Dentistry can help!
Contact your local Phoenix cosmetic dentist for a smile evaluation today!

Good Oral Health is a must before cosmetic dentistry.

 

Oral health is often taken for granted, but it is an essential part of our everyday lives. Good oral health enhances our ability to speak, smile, smell, taste, touch, chew, swallow, and convey our feelings and emotions through facial expressions. However, oral diseases, which range from cavities to oral cancer, cause pain and disability for millions of Americans each year. For example,

• Tooth decay (cavities) is a common problem for people of all ages. For children, untreated cavities can cause pain, dysfunction, school absences, difficulty concentrating, and poor appearance—problems that greatly affect a child’s quality of life and ability to succeed. Children from lower-income families often do not receive timely treatment for tooth decay, and they are more likely to suffer from these problems.Tooth decay is also a problem for many U.S. adults, and adults and children of some racial and ethnic groups experience more untreated decay.
• Periodontal (gum) disease is an infection caused by bacteria that gets under the gum tissue and begins to destroy the gums and bone. Teeth become loose, chewing becomes difficult, and teeth may have to be extracted. Gum disease also may be connected to damage elsewhere in the body; recent studies link oral infections with diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and premature, low-weight births. Further research is under way to examine these connections.
• Your local  Phoenix cosmetic dentist will provide you with a comprehensive oral health exam.

Cosmetic Dentistry

How long has cosmetic dentistry been available?

Just about everyone knows about George Washington’s famous wooden teeth, but they were not made of wood. They were constructed from various animals bones, ivory and even human teeth. Still, as such, they weren’t so much cosmetic as they were necessary. Washington’s real choppers were long gone, and without his false teeth he would have had a tough time chewing anything, well, tough.

And yet, Washington’s false teeth also provided considerable cosmetic effect, considering the caved-in look the face assumes without the structural support of teeth.

The idea of cosmetic dentistry certainly goes back to ancient times, even in limited forms, but real cosmetic dentistry — procedures designed to make teeth look good — really took modern form in the early 1900s when Charles Land created the first “jacket crown” made of porcelain.

But it was Hollywood that may have provided the greatest boost for real cosmetic dental techniques. As it happens, many famous actors of the 1920s and ‘30s still had old world dental practices, meaning many of them had bad teeth. When it came time for their close-up on the big screen, well, having nice teeth became obviously important.

So in the 1930s, the concept of applying veneers was championed by dentist Charles Pincus, who developed a way to glue tooth-shaped porcelain across the front of bad teeth, creating the first line of viable cosmetic dentistry products.

But truly natural looking, effective, and dentally sound cosmetic dental fixes would take another four decades to be developed, and a major breakthrough was made by in 1949 by Oskar Haggar. He developed the first method of bonding an acrylic resin to human tooth dentin. The only trouble was, this wonderfully pliable substance did not come in white.

In 1955, Michael Buonocore finally cracked the code that allowed for tooth-like white acrylic materials that could be sculpted and shaped to repair teeth, filling in cracks and gaps, and rounding out or even lengthening teeth to make them look even and natural. Add to this an acid etching procedure Buonocore described which made his white acrylic stick to teeth solidly — a procedure called bonding — and the stage was set for complete cosmetic density capability.

Note that bonding with acrylics is not the same as applying a veneer. The later is basically a false front for teeth, although both are still very much in use today. It wasn’t until the 1980s that an impressive arsenal of tools, substances and methods were made available to all dentists and the general public at a somewhat affordable price, allowing anyone who can pay a perfect smile, no matter how bad their teeth might be.

Today, in addition to veneers and composite dental filling and bonding techniques, methods to whiten the teeth have taken a major leap forward with a variety of new safe chemical substances, and even lasers.

A final area of cosmetic dentistry innovation must be mentioned to make cosmetic dentistry complete — dental implants. Again, although crude forms of implanting false teeth have been around for centuries, it only became a viable art in the 1990s when dentists learned to fuse titanium to bone, enabling the anchoring of a replacement tooth directly into the jaw, for that “good as a real tooth” result.

Today, cosmetic dentistry is an advanced art and science, and many levels of application are available to the general public. The simplest form would probably be whitening techniques, many of which don’t require professional application.

In the meantime, professionals are seeing rapid growth in cosmetic dentistry demand. The American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry commissioned a study in 2007 which showed that cosmetic treatments are growing each year, and that cosmetic services account for an average of $500,000 per year in income for individual dental offices.

Cosmetic dentistry is easily a billions of dollars per year industry in the U.S. alone. Two-thirds of cosmetic dentistry patients are women, and 1/3 are males. The biggest demand for cosmetic procedures come from the 41 to 60 age category.

The No. 1 cosmetic dental procedure? It’s dental bonding, with some 2.63 million procedures performed annually at an estimated cost of $383 million. Veneers come in second with almost 600,000 done per year at a cost of $372 million.

And yes, it’s expensive. Most insurances don’t cover much or any cosmetic dental procedure costs. But what is having that million-dollar smile worth? Well, for many, maybe just that. A million dollars.

 

Washington—Suppliers of the technical component of advanced diagnostic imaging services for Medicare beneficiaries must be accredited to be reimbursed for the claim if the service is performed on or after Jan. 1, 2012. The accreditation requirement applies to suppliers of the images and not the physician’s interpretation.

Sacramento, Calif.—Legislation approved by the state senate Jan. 26 would create a dentist-led Statewide Office of Oral Health within the state Department of Public Health charged with addressing the “significant human and financial costs” of unmet dental needs.

Indianapolis—Dr. Lloyd J. Phillips, a past ADA trustee who represented the 7th District from 1970 to 1976, died Jan. 15 here. He was 89.