General Dentistry
Comprehensive Dental Care
General dentistry includes all of the foundational dental services necessary to care for your smile over your lifetime.
General Dentistry in Port Macquarie
At Port Pacific Dental, we understand the critical role your healthcare providers play in your family’s well-being, and we look forward to helping your family’s smiles stay healthy and beautiful. We offer everything from preventive dentistry to full smile makeovers and everything in between, including comprehensive dental examinations, plaque and calculus removal, oral hygiene education, crowns, bridges, tooth coloured fillings, root canal treatments, dental implants, cosmetic dentistry, children’s dentistry, and emergency dentistry all here at Port Pacific Dental in our warm, welcoming environment.
Our Preventive Dental Services
The primary way you can support the prevention of tooth, gum, bone and joint problems is to maintain regular check-ups. These should include a comprehensive exam including your joints, bone, muscles, soft tissues, gums and teeth. You will also have a thorough clean to remove any plaque and debris left after your home-care routine, followed by tooth polishing for that extra shine.
Through preventive services, our dental team can:
- Assess your tooth and gum health conditions
- Take digital, intra-oral and panoramic x-rays
- Screen for oral cancer
- Clean plaque and calculus from hard to reach areas on your gums and between teeth
- Add shine to your teeth with a finishing polish
- Provide a treatment plan customised to your unique health situation
Maintain and Repair Your Teeth at Port Pacific Dental
The best time to treat an oral health problem like a cavity or gum infection is early and while it’s still small. Port Pacific Dental offers many dental services to restore and preserve your teeth, including tooth replacements and dental implants.
Through preventive services, our dental team can:
- Assess your tooth and gum health conditions
- Take digital, intra-oral and panoramic x-rays
- Screen for oral cancer
- Clean plaque and calculus from hard to reach areas on your gums and between teeth
- Add shine to your teeth with a finishing polish
- Provide a treatment plan customised to your unique health situation
Strong Oral Health Promotes Overall Health
The primary way you can support the prevention of tooth, gum, bone and joint problems is to maintain regular check-ups. These should include a comprehensive exam including your joints, bone, muscles, soft tissues, gums and teeth. You will also have a thorough clean to remove any plaque and debris left after your home-care routine, followed by tooth polishing for that extra shine.
General Dentistry in Port Macquarie
We invite you to call us at Port Pacific Dental to learn how our complete dentistry services can serve your needs. Our caring team of dental professionals are ready to help our friends and neighbours in Thrumster, Laurieton, Wauchope, and Kempsey. We look forward to being your oral health partner.
FAQ
Missing and decayed teeth are pretty common. The average Australian adult has between four and eleven teeth damaged or completely gone. For those with one or more missing teeth, you should recognise the problems caused when you elect not to replace them.
When you lose a tooth or have it extracted in Port Macquarie, the space it once occupied in your jaw is called an empty socket. This leftover space is the epicentre of what happens if you don’t replace a missing tooth.
Empty Sockets Endanger Bone and Gum Health
Because it takes a while for your socket to heal, it can become a place where plaque-causing bacteria can accumulate, away from the cleansing effects of your toothbrush. That bacteria may proliferate and colonize nearby gum tissue, accelerating the effects of periodontal disease.
Your empty socket also impacts your jawbone health because chewing pressure conducted via an intact tooth stimulates bone growth. So while the bone tissue within the socket will eventually regenerate, the lack of pressure will allow your bone density to decrease. As a result, after years, your jawbone may become more slender and prone to fracture.
Adjoining Teeth Placed under Extra Stress
Your teeth work best as a team, each performing a specific task. So if a teammate goes missing, its neighbours are forced to pick up the slack. While you may overlook the impact on your other teeth in the short term, the accumulated stresses can build up over time. We see this, especially with molar and premolar teeth, which do the lion’s share of the work to grind up food.
These added stresses may lead to tooth fractures or uneven wear, but the most severe consequence is that your adjoining teeth may shift towards the gap.
Remaining Teeth Shift into Missing Tooth Space
The most significant threat a missing tooth is to its neighbours is how they naturally will shift into the space. This process may take several years to notice, but the impacts are widespread when it happens. First, your entire bite may become misaligned, harming your jaw joint and leading to painful TMJ disorders and further tooth decay. Next, loosening and shifting teeth are themselves candidates for loss.
Missing teeth ultimately lead to more missing teeth, a cascade of oral health problems that hurts your entire smile. But by replacing missing teeth with Port Pacific Dental, you can simultaneously avoid these pitfalls and enjoy an intact smile.
Our team will make you comfortable and relaxed at your first dental visit to Port Pacific Dental. Dr Emil Fernando will discuss your dental concerns and questions, as well as your needs and expectations.
Then we will gather information from you regarding medical, dental and social history and perform a comprehensive examination. This will include taking x-rays for accurate diagnosis, followed by a complete personalised analysis. Finally, we will explain your recommended treatment options, their pros and cons, and associated costs.
The Advantages of Choosing Port Pacific Dental
Dr Fernando offers dental treatments which consider you as a whole person. His approach has many advantages, including:
- Clear dental explanations using terminology you can understand
- Emphasis on treating dental anxiety on all levels
- Outreach to patients who may feel dental care is beyond their means
- Bulk-billed dental benefit schemes for children, veterans and families in need
- Cosmetic dentistry options are also available
You Decide Which Treatments Are Right for Your Smile
At every step of the process, we discuss any questions you have to ensure you understand all treatment facets to make an informed decision.
We invite families and adults in the Port Macquarie area and Sancrox, Thrumster, King Creek, Lake Innes, Lake Cathie, Bonny Hills, Laurieton, Wauchope, Kempsey, Crescenthead and South West Rocks to contact us to arrange their first dental appointment.
Our dental practice prioritises a gentle approach to enhance your comfort for every treatment. But the vast majority of the time, if you feel dental pain, it’s usually caused by your dental condition, not the cure. So if your toothaches due to an infection that has spread inside your tooth and gums, you feel pain because:
- Your body is signalling that you have a problem
- Inflammation, a natural response to infection, causes pressure on your tooth nerve. That hurts a lot.
- Because infection inevitably spreads, that increase in bacteria further inflames tissues.
Dr Emil Fernando can apply solutions for your dental pain. Though procedures can feel stressful, if you can associate the work with how much it will relieve your pain in the long run, you may even begin looking forward to your dental visits.
Port Pacific Dental Values Pain-Free and Anxiety-Free Dentistry
Another thing that helps us lessen your pain is our extensive experience. This allows us to apply anesthetic effectively and only to the areas we intend to treat. Specific techniques even make your anesthetic injections nearly painless.
We also use the latest technology and offer many options for pain-free treatments. If you’d like to learn more, you may visit our Anxiety-Relief Options page for the full array of services available. We can help make your dental appointments the most positive experience possible in Port Macquarie and beyond.