Restorative Dental Services at Thantakit International Dental Center in Bangkok

The Thantakit International Dental Center is the first dental clinic in Thailand to pioneer the dental implant treatment in 1973 and the Invisalign treatment in 2002. It is considered one of the oldest and most esteemed Bangkok dental centers. Housed in a 5-storey Central Bangkok building, Thantakit has been practicing the art of dentistry for more than half a century – 70 years to be exact.

Thantakit International Dental Center employs sophisticated dental technology – such as 3D dental CT scan – for all your dental implant needs as well as the intra-oral camera, imaging systems, digital x-rays and an LCD monitor that’s included within all treatment rooms for easy viewing of every scan. The clinic ensures all of its customers that the pricing for all services and operations are the same for both local and international patients. This way, you’re assured of topnotch quality with no biased treatment given to one type of patient or another.

Restorative Dental Treatments

Thantakit Clinic employs quality restorative dentistry services. Incidentally, this dentistry type is the diagnosis and integrated management of dental diseases and their supporting structures. It also includes dentition rehabilitation to meet the aesthetic and functional needs of the patient. Restorative dentistry covers the dental branches of prosthodontics, periodontics, and endodontics, with its foundation based on how these specialties interact with each other when dealing with complex, multifaceted cases. Here are important things to consider about restorative dental treatments:

• Traumatic Injuries and Other Teeth Diseases: Restorative dentistry is dependable when it comes to addressing various medical conditions and teeth diseases like periodontal disease, gingivitis, and tooth decay.  It can also deal with dental trauma from when you’ve been punched in the face, fell down the stairs, or involved in a car accident.
• All You Want for Christmas Is Your Two Front Teeth: Traumatic injuries to the front or anterior teeth frequently happen to both adults and children, after all. What restorative treatment is needed for your injury will be dictated by the degree of trauma. It might even include one or more dental specialties listed below. It can include repairing broken teeth or replacing them with implants and crowns and/or bridges.
• Rehabilitation of Dentition: The main purpose of restorative dentistry with its integrated management, diagnosis, and study of teeth disease and their supportive structures is the rehabilitation of dentition or use of your teeth for biting and grinding food for sustenance. Meanwhile, it also deals with fulfilling your aesthetic needs such that it covers both dental form and function or design and usefulness.

Composite or Tooth-Colored Dental Fillings

Composite or tooth-colored dental filings are the first line of defense or dental restoration against tooth decay. This restorative dental treatment is designed to be natural and inconspicuous in appearance. It’s supposed to blend well with the rest of your set of teeth and appear more natural than amalgam fillings, which are more easily seen and darker in terms of looks. It’s safer to if you think about it, since amalgam contains mercury that can be harmful to your health.

• Materials Used: Tooth-colored dental fillings are made of plastic and ceramic compounds that bond chemically unto your teeth. They come in a sort of paste form that’s stuck into your teeth’s cavity by the dentist and then hardened by special lights. It can be applied to fill in gaps and decayed areas of the tooth, but if there’s not much left of the tooth itself, it tends to easily break or pop out.
• Repairs All Sorts of Damage: A composite filling is capable of repairing broken or chipped teeth but it’s mostly used to fill in dental caries or cavities like cement to a pothole. Most dentists use filings to treat the teeth closest to the front of the mouth because they’re more noticeable when someone smiles. They’re also used on molars as well, but only advanced fillings that can take the grinding forces of your back teeth.
• Rule of Thumb: As a rule of thumb, though, you shouldn’t keep refilling a tooth over and over because over time there won’t be much of the tooth left. The dentist after all has to drill into the hole every time to allow the filling to take hold.  Don’t overdo the filling; instead, minimize filling a tooth to one or two times at the most. Otherwise, you might end up having to get an inlay, onlay, veneer, or crown.

Amalgam or Silver Dental Fillings

Speaking of which, the dental amalgam or silver dental fillings is a type of filling that’s tougher than tooth-colored fillings and thus are used at the back row teeth that aren’t readily apparent when you smile, like your molars and the like. This malleable and metallic dental filing material has been used for more than 150 year in about 100,000,000 patients all over the globe.

• What Is It Made of? Silver dental fillings, despite the name, contain mostly elemental mercury. It gets the silver moniker from its silvery appearance and the fact that the powdered alloy combined with mercury to make it is part silver. The other parts are made of tin and copper. The powdered metal forms a cement-like filling you can place on molar cavities that can last a long time.
• How Much Mercury Is In Amalgam: Dental amalgam is a mix of powdered metals combined together through elemental mercury. The mercury comprises 50 percent of the filling. Its chemical properties enable it to react with the powdered metals and bind them together to form an amalgam, hence its other name. It’s known to be strong and long-lasting, with it less likely to break apart due to the bite forces of your molar or back teeth. It’s also less expensive.
• Potential Health Issues: However, it has potential risks exactly because it uses mercury that can be released in vapor form at low levels that can in turn be absorbed by the lungs. On the other hand, the FDA considers amalgam safe for adults and children. Some patients opt out from using it and there are even others who outright remove amalgam filling placed on their teeth during childhood through a special dental clinic process.

Inlays, Onlays, & Veneers

As for dental caries, cavities, or tooth decay, the outcome of such a disease can be determined by the tug-of-war between factors that lead to remineralization and the pathological factors that cause demineralization in the first place. What this means is that restorative dentistry is minimal and preventative during the early stages of cavity formation but will become more expensive and detailed as the decay worsens. This is where inlays, onlays, and veneers come in.

• Inlay: Usually availed of when the tooth cavity is too large for a simple filling, the inlay is made as a single, solid piece that fits the specific size and shape of the cavity. It’s much more conservative than the crown in the amount of teeth material removed. In order to make it stick, it’s cemented into place. Think of it as an advanced type of filling that comes in one piece so that it doesn’t easily break from the force of your biting, chewing, and grinding.
• Onlay: More material is used on this than the inlay but it doesn’t quite cover the tooth like the crown. This restoration is known for its partial coverage of the tooth’s cusp. It’s also fabricated as a single, solid piece and is also cemented into place. It’s the type of prosthodontic repair that you put on the top of the tooth in case the cavity is located there.
• Veneers: These also cover the tooth but mostly the front-facing part of them that’s seen when you smile. This is also the reason why veneers are mostly used on front teeth wherein the tooth filling couldn’t fix the cavities any longer. Thantakit dentists will guarantee that your veneers are custom-made and permanently bonded to your teeth to restore your bite and smile at the same time.

Incidentally, Thantakit has its own dental laboratory that allows them to synthesize prosthetic teeth like veneers, inlays, and onlays. Their lab also deals with any minor adjustments or corrections to dental works effectively and quickly. The clinic even offers same-day implant therapy or prosthodontics if it’s requested by the patient. 

Porcelain Crowns & Fixed Bridges

If inlays, onlays, and veneers are simply not enough to cover up the imperfections or cavities of your tooth or teeth then it’s about time you’ve availed of dental crowns or fixed tooth bridges. Both of them cover the entirety of the tooth or teeth rather than just cavities or parts of them, thus necessitating extensive teeth drilling and shaving to make them fit.

• What are Dental Crowns and Tooth Bridges? They are prosthetic teeth that are permanently applied to your damaged or misshapen teeth by cementing them into implants or existing teeth. They can only be removed by a dentist as well. Meanwhile, porcelain crowns in particular work best in recreating the brightness, texture, and color of your tooth’s enamel so that it doesn’t look out of place with the rest of your teeth. It can even help straighten crooked teeth and fill in gaps for good measure.
• Why Should You Get a Crown? A crown covers the entirety of your damaged tooth that’s visible above the surface of your gums like a cap. Your Thantakit dentist may recommend a crown to do the following:

• A crown can cover a dental implant.
• A crown can restore a fractured tooth or teeth.
• A crown can hide a poorly shaped or discolored tooth.
• A crown can protect a weak or dead tooth from further fracturing.
• A crown can cover a tooth that has undergone a root canal procedure.
• A crown can replace a large filling because there isn’t any tooth remaining to make the filling stick.
• How Do Bridges Work? A bridge is a type of crown wherein one or two teeth serve as its foundational posts while the middle tooth or teeth hangs suspended above the gums like a bridge. It’s used to keep your teeth from shifting or rotating into the empty spaces or gaps left by missing teeth. It maintains your original smile, bite, and face shape in a way. It even prevents temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorders and gum disease for good measure.

Root Canal Therapy

Last but not least is root canal therapy or endodontic treatment. In order to avoid tooth extraction, missing teeth, and the extremely expensive process of dental implantation (wherein a metal stud is screwed into your jaw and gums to simulate a tooth whose root is still intact), you can rehabilitate a severely decayed tooth with an inflamed tooth root by removing the root and replacing the empty space with inert material.

• Save The Tooth: Endodontic treatment is used as a “last” resort to save a tooth from extraction or even death. This is reserved for teeth so severely decayed that you can no longer use fillings on them and are so painful that inlays, onlays, veneers, and crowns aren’t viable anymore because it’s dying with an inflamed tooth root. The tooth root nerve inflammation usually happens because the root is now exposed thanks to the hole on the enamel and dentin caused by dental caries. First, the tooth is x-rayed then the infection is eliminated. Second, the tooth is decontaminated to ensure protection from future microbial invasions.
• Kill The Tooth: In order to save a severely decayed tooth with a throbbing tooth root, you have to remove the root and infected pulp, thus essentially killing the tooth. From there, you cover it with a porcelain crown because it’s dead and the enamel has no means of receiving nutrients to keep it hard and not brittle. The remnants of your once alive tooth will now serve as the means to anchor the crown to your mouth and nothing else. Endodontics also involves cleaning, protection, and removal of the pulp chamber, nerve tissue, blood vessels, and other such infected structures.
• Why Not Use Antibiotics to Treat Infection? There is periradicular surgery available that allows you to save a tooth from require primary and secondary endodontic treatment for teeth that are still salvageable. However, more often than not, when you reach pulp infection and nerve damage, your tooth has already crossed the point of no return so your best course of action is to undergo a root canal treatment anyway. The procedure also decontaminates the tooth, allowing the dentist to put inert material on it to keep its shape and to protect it from caving in.

In Conclusion

Restorative dentistry covers the dental disciplines of prosthodontics, endodontics, and periodontics as part of its foundation. To be more specific, how these three interact with each other in order to solve a restoration issue is what restorative dentistry is all about, thus ensuring multifaceted care all-in-all. This is what you can expect from the staff and specialists at the Thantakit Clinic. You can indeed depend on Thantakit for your restorative dentistry needs (among many other needs) because it has its own dental laboratory that’s complete with its own lab staff that cooperates with the clinic’s staff in order to closely supervise all the dental procedures that’s going on.

With that said, more and more overseas patients are availing of dental tourism services that allow them to restore their smile cosmetically and functionally through what are known as restorative dental treatments.  The dentists also speak Thai and English for good measure.

Thantakit International Dental Center is Thailand’s longest established dental center. Situated in Bangkok, our clinic is renowned across the world as a destination for world-class dentistry, with most of our patients flying to us from Australia.

Please contact us today and get a FREE dental consultation.