Dental Filling Replacement | Dentist Lethbridge | Cool Dental

Hello, Dr. Lachman from Cool Dental. Question that I get every day: “Does my filling need to be replaced?”. Well basically, let's take a look. Best thing you guys can do at home is take your phone, open your mouth real big and shoot a whack of pictures and expand that thing. I bet you can see a lot of these things at home and then if you see something you don't know what it is or you're concerned about it hey, let's take a peek and discuss it together.

Here's something a patient of mine brought in just last two weeks ago. The patient felt no pain, they had no symptoms. This filling was done 15 years ago by some other dentist and they thought everything was perfectly fine, but look… here is a fracture, here is a fracture, here's a small fracture and here's another one, another one, another one, and another one.

Also, if you look a little closer here's the edge of the filling and here's the edge of the tooth. There's quite a big gap between there. If you can see it, you know bacteria are working their way down between the filling and the tooth. See the dark discolouration almost like a halo or a shadow? Teeth are supposed to be white! That's not normal, that's actually decay. The tooth is slowly rotting from the inside out because of bacterial infection.

Now why does the patient feel no pain? Basically, the mercury in the silver fillings is a neurotoxin. Without getting too scientific, basically what that does is numb the tooth. This filling has been busted and broken and leaking for years but the patient had no clue that something was wrong.

So should this filling be replaced? Hands down, get it out! But should you put a white filling in there? Bad idea, as a white filling does not have the strength needed to fix that. You put a white filling in there it's going to blow up on you. if you do nothing, it is gonna blow up on you.

There's a lot of things that can be done and I will explain in future videos but if you see something on your phone and you're not sure what is get it looked at. Okay?