Dental Services
At Little Big Smiles, we strive to make your visit as comfortable and pain-free as possible. We offer a wide range of dental services, including restorative, sedation dentistry, wisdom teeth removal, and teeth whitening to be sure we can take care of all your needs while you are here.
In order to stabilize your dentition, removing cavities is one of our main priorities. After cavity removal, restorative dentistry takes place to restore and support the remaining tooth structure. For small cavities, our tooth colored fillings are the go-to material. Using some of the strongest dental bonding materials our composite fillings will stay in your mouth for many years. If there’s just too much tooth structure missing, then dental crowns will be placed to help protect the remaining tooth and prevent possible tooth fractures in the future. For a more cosmetic friendly look, all porcelain crowns or dental veneers can be placed, allowing them to blend with the rest of your mouth. If there’s already some areas that are missing teeth, we can utilize surrounding teeth in making dental bridges to cover the missing areas. For large areas, full or partial dentures are good options. With the current advancements in dental implants, titanium roots can also be used to help support dentures and dental crowns or bridges.
For some people dental work can just be too unbearable. That’s why we offer a variety of ways to make you as comfortable as possible, with many types of sedation dentistry to cater to your comfort level and take care of your needs.
Once urgent treatments and underlying gum issues are taken care of we then offer teeth whitening treatments to make sure the look and color of your teeth is what you want it to be.
Wisdom Teeth
We believe in preserving as much of the tooth structure as we can, while providing long lasting restorations. Small cavities are easily restored using high strength dental bonding materials. Even though our composite filling material have good aesthetic qualities, there is still a chance for the edges of the fillings to stain over time. Therefore, for more aesthetic areas, such as your front teeth, we offer dental porcelain veneers. Larger cavities require dental crowns to make sure we provide good coverage of the affected area, while preserving the remaining tooth structure to prevent further fractures or decay. If there is an area that is missing teeth, we offer many options for restoration. Dental bridges are an option for replacing the missing teeth by using adjacent teeth. For a larger area that is missing teeth, the option is removable partial dentures, that anchor onto your existing teeth, or full dentures, for the places where there are no teeth remaining. Keep in mind, the dentures are a removable appliance, but they can be made more stable and fixed with dental implants. With recent advances in dental implantology, titanium dental implants are becoming a go-to option for replacing areas that are missing teeth. Dental implants can act as single root replacement for crowns or act as anchor/abutment roots for dental bridges and even dentures. If you have questions regarding these options, please feel free to contact us.
Sedation Dentistry
Our goal is to provide you with pain-free dentistry. Dr. Chen is very gentle and will make things as comfortable as he can for you. However, we do offer various dental sedation options that can ease any pain you may want to avoid. We can offer something as simple as nitrous oxide, or “laughing gas”, for a light sedation, to a little heavier sedation via medications that will work like sleeping aids, which you can take before coming to see us, and by the time you get to our office, you’ll already be relaxed. If the above methods still don’t work for you, we do have a dental anesthesiologist or sedation dentist that can come into our office and perform an IV sedation. With IV sedation, you are not fully sedated like in a hospital operating room, but you are sedated enough that you are not aware of dental treatments being done and usually will not remember much of the procedures afterwards. This is a good option for people who are just terrified of even hearing our equipment work, but have important dentistry needs. We put great value in our services to help you protect and maintain a healthy mouth, so don’t let a fear of the dentist get in your way of a healthy and beautiful smile.
Restorative Dentistry
We believe in minimally invasive treatments. This means that we preserve as much the tooth structure as we can while providing you with long lasting restorations. Small cavities are easily restored using high strength dental bonding materials Even though our composite filling material has good aesthetic qualities, there is still a chance for the edges of the fillings to stain over time. Therefore, for more aesthetic areas such as your front teeth we offer dental porcelain veneers. Larger cavities require dental crowns to make sure we provide good coverage of the affected area, while preserving the remaining tooth structure to prevent further fractures or decay. If there is an area that is missing teeth, we offer many options for restoration. Dental bridges are an option for replacing the missing teeth by using adjacent teeth. For a larger area that is missing teeth, the option is removable partial dentures, that anchor onto your existing teeth, or full dentures, for the places where there are no teeth remaining. Keep in mind, the dentures are a removable appliance, but they can be made more stable and fixed with dental implants. With recent advances in dental implantology, titanium dental implants are becoming a go-to option for replacing areas that are missing teeth. Dental implants can act as single root replacement for crowns or act as anchor/abutment roots for dental bridges and even dentures. If you have questions regarding these options, please feel free to contact us.
Teeth Whitening
Teeth whitening can very rewarding, not only in making your teeth look pearly white, but also in helping boost your self-confidence. Although teeth whitening has been touted as an easy and comfortable procedure, it can have some adverse effects on your teeth, if your teeth and gums are not healthy. Before we recommend any teeth whitening procedures, Dr. Chen will do a thorough exam to make sure your teeth and gums are strong and healthy.
After your immediate dental issues are tended to, then you will have the option to brighten your smile with teeth whitening. We can do it two ways: 1) provide take home trays and you can whiten your teeth at your convenience, or 2) we can whiten your teeth at the office. Both options will help you get the same bright smile you want, they just at different speeds. With the in-office option, you can get whiter results faster and we can monitor the whitening progress. The whitening systems we use here are proven to be effective and gentle to your mouth. However, teeth sensitivity is still possible during or after the procedure. This is why we take care to shield your gums in office, or provide custom bleaching trays for you to use at home. We want you to be happy with any of the procedures we provide, so if you run into any problems or questions, please let us know!
Dental Implants
Dental implants are an artificial root we place in your mouth to replace the missing teeth area. They are titanium based as titanium material has shown great compatibility with our body.
We recommend dental implants over traditional dental bridge for the following reasons:
1. No other teeth involved. With traditional dental bridges we need to prepare the teeth next to the mission tooth area to use them as anchors for the bridge that we place. By using implants we can protect the surrounding teeth.
2. Easier to clean. With traditional dental bridges it can be hard to clean underneath the bridge and oftentimes this leads to failure of the anchor teeth or the bridge. With dental implants you can treat them as a single tooth by brushing and flossing them regularly.
3. Easier to replace. For a traditional dental bridge, if one part of the bridge is broken or if the anchor tooth needs to come out, you must replace the whole dental bridge. For implants, if the crown is broken, we just need to replace the crown.
Dental implants can also be used to anchor complete dentures. This is a great option for patients experiencing instability with their dentures. Regular dentures just sit on top of our gums and its main source of stability is suction to the gums. If there is significant wear on our gums, the dentures can become quite loose. With the dental implants as anchors, we can restore and improve the stability of the dentures in the mouth.
Dental implants are beneficial for to replace missing teeth, but there are still a few requirements for the proper integration and sustainability of the implants. Most importantly we look at the amount of bone left after the tooth is gone. It is common for people to see some bone loss when a tooth is removed, so if the bone is not wide enough it might not be able to accommodate our implants. All is not lost however, we do have bone graft material and implant site augmentation treatments to prepare the area for proper placement of dental implants.
Each case and situation is different, if you are interested, feel free to ask Dr. Chen for a more in-depth discussion on your various treatment options.
Dental Bridges
What do you do when you have a missing tooth and you want to fill that gap? One of the many options we offer is a dental bridge. Dental bridges are 3 or more dental crowns linked together to cover up a missing area. We use your teeth around the missing tooth area as anchors for your dental bridge. Dental bridges can be made from several different types of material. The traditional one is the porcelain fused to metal bridge. We use high noble metals because they are more resistant to corrosion and more bio-compatible. Then the porcelain is added on top so it blends with the rest of your mouth. With good tooth preparation and proper home care there will be no metal showing. If you are interested in a more aesthetic option, instead of the metal substructure we can replace that with a zirconia frame. Although zirconia is technically classified as a metal, it actually can be made to match our tooth colors. So for zirconia bridges we can either use zirconia throughout or if your case is more aesthetically challenging we can still layer porcelain on top. These restorations are customized for your mouth to ensure the best cosmetic outcome.