Specialist Column

A splint (bruxism mouthguard) protects teeth and prostheses, while jaw Botox reduces the load on the chewing muscles. Here is how Yeonhap Dental Clinic chooses between soft and hard splints, our criteria for temporalis and masseter injections, the order we use, and the limits of each.

Composite resin, GI, and Bondfill bond in different ways and suit different sites. When restoring cavities and worn teeth, Yeonhap Dental Clinic chooses the material by looking at location, moisture control, and chewing force.

The type of cavity treatment is not decided by depth alone. Yeonhap Dental Clinic chooses among resin, inlay, and crown by looking at the extent of the decay, the remaining tooth walls, and cracks.

Scaling removes the tartar visible above the gum line, while gum treatment reaches inside the periodontal pocket under the gum. They are not two names for the same thing; they differ in the depth they reach. Cleaning the inside of the pocket is reported to reduce pocket depth by 1.7 mm on average and to close about 74% of pockets, and if any sites remain deeper than 4 mm, surgery is considered for those sites only. National Health Insurance applies one preventive scaling per year for patients aged 19 and older, and periodontal disease treatment is a separate item.

When a filling keeps coming off, the condition of the tooth, the bite, and chewing habits all need to be looked at together. Yeonhap Dental Clinic chooses the material again to fit the conditions we have checked.

Q-ray shows early cavities, areas around fillings, and suspected cracks using fluorescence. Yeonhap Dental Clinic makes its judgment by adding repeat imaging and checks of radiographs and symptoms.

Once a notch forms at the neck of a tooth, it does not recover on its own and can only progress toward getting deeper. That said, we do not fill it the moment it is seen. At a very shallow stage there is not enough room for the restoration to be retained, and conversely, the deeper it gets, the greater the stress on the tooth. Yeonhap Dental Clinic uses an axial depth of about 1.5 mm as its threshold for intervention. In a study that loaded extracted premolars and measured deformation by depth, cervical deformation was reported to increase significantly at 1.5 mm (Du 2020), and Yeonhap Dental Clinic in Gwonseon-gu, Suwon, makes its judgment around that range and restores without delay.