When you visit Dr. Giulio Spagnuolo and the team at We Smile Dentistry in West London, Ontario, you not only can expect top-quality dental treatment but also a warm, caring environment that welcomes questions and offers dental education. We understand that oral health education plays a significant role in your oral health.
Whether you have questions about the many dental treatments we provide here at We, Smile Dentistry, or you need advice for at-home dental care, Dr. Spagnuolo and our team are here for you. Please check out our patient education videos below if you want to learn about some of the dental treatments and services we offer. We look forward to seeing you in our West London, Ontario, office soon!
Dr. Spagnuolo Answers Your Invisalign FAQs
1: What exactly is Invisalign?
2: So exactly, Invisalign is a company that designed clear plastic aligners first. It’s a method of treating orthodontic cases. These aligners snap onto the teeth and gently move them.
1: So do I only get one aligner?
2: Good question but unfortunately no. The teeth are scanned and the company gets a scan and the aligners are designed. You get a series of aligners that are set on the original scan. So, this is a small sample, it can be 50 aligners, and you wear the aligners for a full week at a time. That’s our typical treatment.
1: How long does treatment take, and is it actually faster than traditional braces?
2: Most cases we can get done inside of two years, just the same as traditional braces. I don’t look at it as being faster or better than traditional braces. At the end of the treatment, we need to get an equivalent result, so I usually tell my patients that it’ll take no longer, no faster than traditional braces.
1: Are there situations where you actually can’t use it?
2: Yes, there are. There are certain patients that require orthognathic surgery, so Invisalign is not indicated in those cases.
1: How do I know if I’m a candidate for Invisalign?
2: Great question. You’ll need to see your orthodontist or your family dentist, and together you’ll make a decision if Invisalign is the proper treatment for you.
1: Do I need retainers after my treatment?
2: Absolutely, you need retainers. Teeth will want to move after treatment and hopefully, at the end of treatment, you’re super thrilled with your smile and you’ll want to do everything possible to keep them exactly as it is for many years.
Crafting A CEREC Crown In Real Time
1: Hi, it is Kelly and Dr. Spagnuolo at We Smile Dentistry and we are going to show you how we design a CEREC crown.
2: Hello, we’re going to be designing a couple of crowns for our model patient and we’ll show you how easy this really is. We pick our material that we want to use, and then we click on the teeth that we need to do for the crowns, and if we want to replace things, we can. If we don’t, we just keep going. So, we’ve got a couple of teeth there. The next thing we need to do is we need to take photographs of our model patient. So you can do them in any order you want. I typically will take models of the bite first, and you can hear our wonderful music going. And that’s for the bite. And then, I will take pictures of the opposing jaw because that is required for when the teeth are made so that they fit properly, the crowns to the bite of the person. Now, we’ll take pictures of our prepared teeth and of course this is of the model. This already would have been done. And when you’re working on a live patient, you don’t need this model. And you can see on the screen we’ve got a green little check mark that says the computer is happy with the bite. And so the next thing we do is we hit the magic ‘go’ button, and the computer now will begin the process for the crown. So, the models are made digitally, and this usually takes a minute or two, and then we need to edit and improve things for the patient.
1: How long is this appointment normally?
2: This appointment, usually the first, it’s about two, two-and-a-half hours. Part of the appointment is design, which usually can be anywhere between 10 and 15 minutes. Part of the appointment is preparing the teeth and that’s usually between 30 and 45 minutes. And at the end, the crowns need to be cemented. And in this particular case, CEREC crowns are all porcelain. There’s no metal inside. Now this is the case and we can open things up, close things, and see what’s going on. Now the computer has, needs a little minor improvement over here for where the crown needs to go. So now we can check to see how things have been prepared, and we see everything is in green, so that usually means we’re good to go. We can check the other tooth. Everything is in green, so that’s good to go. We hit our little magic ‘go’ button again.
Now we check to see how the crowns look. We could look at them individually, we could look at them against the top teeth to make sure the teeth are biting down properly. And the other part that we will look at is to see that the crowns need to be able to touch each other, so food doesn’t get jammed in there. And we can also check to make sure that everything is properly fit and for the material, and in this particular case, it is because there’s no indication of errors. And so we are now ready to go to have the crown milled. So, out of a block, it gets milled and that usually takes 10 to 15 minutes per crown.
1: Perfect. Thank you.
The Ultimate Guide to Dental Sleep Appliances
1: What is a dental sleep appliance?
2: Great question, Kelly. This is a version of a dental sleep appliance. It’s a two-piece mouthpiece that is attached together that helps to position your jaw in a certain way so that the airway is opened up and you breathe better at night.
1: Who is the ideal candidate?
2: Well, the ideal candidate, if we look at models of teeth, as you can see here an upper jaw and the lower jaw, the model of teeth, that the ideal candidate has all their teeth, they’re in good shape and they’re going to the dentist. And then, what happens is that the appliance is made very, very comfortably to fit over the teeth, snaps into place and positions the jaw in a certain way so that the airway is opened up and so the person can sleep comfortably at night. I find that this particular appliance is actually one of the most comfortable out there in the market for patients.
1: How much do they cost?
2: It’s always a difficult question to answer on a video, but you should expect to pay somewhere between $3,500 and $4,000 depending on the complexity.
1: Do they replace a CPAP machine?
2: They’re meant to replace a CPAP machine in most cases. Typically, many of our patients who wear this have failed the CPAP because they don’t like it. It’s too noisy, and so they replace it with one of these so they can cure their sleep apnea. So this appliance is meant to treat your sleep apnea. So yes, it does replace your CPAP machine in most instances.
A 5-Minute Journey with iTero Technology
1: Hi, it’s Kelly and Dr. Spagnuolo at We Smile Dentistry. Here we have just completed an iTero scan on one of our patients and Dr. Spagnuolo is going to review the scan.
2: Hello, so this scan took approximately five minutes to do from start to finish. And we can look at her teeth in many different forms. We can look at just the bottom arch, and we can make it bigger and smaller, and what I see here is we have a crown on this tooth. We have fillings in here, they are done in tooth-coloured material. So, sometimes, it’s a little bit challenging to pick to see, but these are fairly big fillings and they are still seeming to be in decent shape. Let’s look at the top. So, we’ll have to flip this around. We’ll notice from an orthodontic point of view, this patient is a post-ortho patient, so teeth are relatively straight still after many years. Somebody’s been wearing her retainers obviously!
Well, look who do we have here? It looks like we have Kelly with our patient Sue and she’s been scanned with our iTero scanner. Here, it looks like we finished the scan of the bottom teeth and now we are gonna go on to the top. And it looks like we’ve almost completed the scan of the top teeth. So far, this process has been only a couple of minutes. (1: Squeeze, good) Now, we’ll be scanning her bite. (1: Open, thanks) So, in this view, we are actually going to be looking at the bite of the patient. As teeth hit harder, the colour goes closer to red, and as the teeth hit less, it goes closer to blue. And you can see nice, relatively nicely uniform bite all the way around, a little bit hard in a couple of spots and that’s something we’ll need to assess if treatments are required in the future. We can also see a bit of gum recession on these photos. As we look at the gum… So this computer scan has wonderful technology called NIRI technology, which allows us to look at the teeth with a special black light filter, so that we can see how things look, and if we find any areas of decay and tartar below. And so, as we are going slowly through this, there is the colour photo and this is the black and white of the same area. As we keep trucking along over and near the bottom front teeth, and there we see a little white area, and that’s tartar buildup. So that’ll be, the hygienists will be spending a little extra time, there’s a little more tartar buildup, making sure those areas are nicely cleaned.
And that’s it!