Dental Veneers • Porcelain Veneers (Podcast)

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“Dental Veneers & Porcelain Veneers”

Hi, this is Dr. Daniel Vinograd. My areas of specialty are biological, holistic dentistry and painless dentistry, and I’d like to speak about porcelain veneers (dental veneers). I’ve been practicing for about 30 years, and in my earlier days when we had problems with discolored teeth (and I’m talking about deeply discolored teeth). We’re talking about teeth that will not bleach out with some of the materials that we have today but more intrinsic discoloration, abrasions from people who actually grind severely, chipped broken teeth, uneven unusually shaped, especially. I’m talking about the front of the mouth, mostly in aesthetic areas, and obviously, we’ve seen people with big diastema, the big spaces between the teeth.

The Aesthetic / Emotional Impact of Porcelain Veneers

I used to not really pay much attention to the aesthetic value of porcelain veneers (dental veneers). I was always more interested in the biological point-of-view. However, over time, I’ve changed my mind because I’ve seen people really have a change of heart about themselves, really have a change in the quality of their lives by looking better. I’ve seen it in the personality. I’ve seen it in the way that they actually interact with the world. So, I definitely feel differently today.

Placing Porcelain Veneers (the latest techniques)

Now, in the past, one of the problems that we had is that we had to do incredibly invasive dentistry to resolve some of these problems. We basically had to grind down a bunch of teeth and put crowns on them. Sometimes, it was worth it, but most of the time, it was just a lot of very aggressive dentistry. With time, materials have changed, and now we are having, at our disposal, the use of bonding materials that are very, very strong. So, techniques have changed dramatically.

What Are Dental Porcelain Veneers?

Porcelain veneers / dental veneers are thin shells that are placed on the front of the teeth, and they’re actually porcelain shells that on their own, tend to be very strong. However, if you put enough pressure on them, they can break. However, once the (porcelain veneers / dental veneers) are bonded on the teeth, they become incredibly resistant, resistant to fracture, resistant to mastication, and they tend to be quite long-lasting.

The Holistic Approach to Porcelain Veneers

So, porcelain veneers/ dental veneers have really changed the way that we practice dentistry and what we can offer to our patients. Initially, dental veneers used to be made out of composite, and they were very time intensive. They were not as long-lasting, and they tended to stain more. So, people have moved away from those quite a bit. Obviously, as a biological dentist, I prefer not to use the composites because they have much more of a Carbon footprint and toxicity than your porcelain- baked porcelain veneers, dental veneers.

So, the procedure is usually to reduce the tooth slightly in the front. Sometimes, you don’t even have to reduce it at all. We have some dental veneers now that are as thin as 0.3 mm, and, so, in some cases, we can actually just place the porcelain veneers without actually having to touch a tooth. Most cases, you have to make some small changes and even opt to have half a millimeter reduction in the front of the tooth, which is quite a bit less than what we had to do previously to resolve some of these problems.

Dental Veneers / Porcelain Veneers: A Great Solution

So, porcelain veneers now allow us to bring people great smiles, and correct some of these problems with spacing, unevenness, and broken teeth in the front without having to create a bigger problem by being so invasive.

Once the teeth have been minimally prepared, we actually send them to the lab, and when we get them back, sometimes a week or two later, we can transform somebody’s smile.

So, this is all for today, and we’ll touch upon other topics in a future time.

Note: Daniel Vinograd, DDS, is a Holistic Dentist (San Diego), specializing in Holistic Procedures, Biocompatible Dentistry, Biological Dentistry, and Painless Dentistry.