Bernstein Dental Care: Blog

Have you recently had a cold drink ruined by a sensation of shooting pain in your teeth? It could be eroded enamel. We hope that all our patients at Bernstein Dental Care in Bay Ridge are enjoying summer treats, but if they’re suffering from tooth sensitivity, we can help. The pulp chambers inside our teeth are highly sensitive. They are surrounded by dentin, a hard substance made up of tubules that easily conduct heat. Dentin is a greyish-yellow color, and although it is normally shielded by a crown’s hard enamel, it can be visible when enamel is thin. Enamel may be worn down by mechanical processes if there is a problem with the patient’s bite or if the patient is grinding their teeth, but in most cases of sensitivity, enamel has been eroded by acid. The most common source of acid is bacteria that consume food debris, although it may also be regurgitated from the stomach. Tooth roots are surrounded by a thin substance called cementum. If the gums have receded enough for the cementum

Are you searching for a way to replace your teeth that won’t leave you with an extremely long recovery time or unstable denture? It sounds like you could use mini-implants. Available at the Bay Ridge office of Bernstein Dental Care, this technology allows us to secure full and partial dentures to a patient’s jaw through minimally invasive techniques. A typical implant is over three millimeters wide and supports a single tooth or part of a bridge. Those are highly effective, but they are not suitable for situations in which a patient has lost a great deal of jaw bone material or needs to replace multiple teeth that aren’t in a row. Mini-implants are less than three millimeters wide and their strength is derived from their length instead of their width. They can often be inserted without incisions and have a much faster osseointegration process, being able to bear the distributed weight of a denture immediately, whereas traditional implants needed several months to stabilize. The abutmen

During the summer, people tend to be more active outdoors and may be at greater risk for dental injuries. While nobody ever plans to get a tooth knocked out, we at Bernstein Dental Care thought it would be a good idea to remind our patients of what steps they can take during a dental emergency to have the best chance of preserving their teeth. When a tooth is knocked out entirely, we call that a “dental avulsion.” The tooth should be lifted by its crown, never its root. There are American Dental Association-approved tooth transport containers that will hopefully be available in a nearby first aid kit, but if not, the tooth should be rinsed with a saline solution. It should then be reinserted into the empty socket, with care to ensure it is facing the right way. If this is too uncomfortable, it may be held in the cheek or in a glass of milk or saltwater, but the patient should have facial lacerations attended to first. We can determine whether a tooth is salvageable. It may not be if th