Dental Bonding

So dental bonding, you can kind of think of it like Velcro. It's a way of micromechanically attaching a filling to your tooth structure. So it's essentially a dental superglue. Dental bonding can be used to adhere tooth-colored filling materials to the tops, the biting surfaces, and in between the teeth for dental restorations that look natural. Dental bonding can also be used to change the shape and the color of teeth to make a cosmetic enhancement to the teeth or replace lost or missing tooth structure. The biggest benefit of bonding is that it's minimally invasive because of its micromechanical properties. When I was growing up, to put a filling in a back tooth, you had to remove excessive tooth structure to place a filling that would be thick enough to support function. With dental bonding, we're able to place fillings into more shallower cavities, preserving natural tooth structure. The process for a bonded filling is much like the process of receiving a traditional filling. The patient is numbed, the cavity or failing filling is removed from the teeth, and then the tooth is prepared to receive the bonded restoration, which is a sequence of steps which now is much shorter than it used to be where we apply a conditioner to the tooth. We activate that conditioner with a ultraviolet light, and then we place a filling with a tooth-colored filling material in the tooth that is set with a ultraviolet light.