If you have some sort of trauma to your mouth and you have cracked, chipped, lose, or (God forbid) missing teeth, no amount of rest or medical attention can do anything to heal them. That’s why we’re so grateful to have skilled cosmetic dentists in Philadelphia. Cosmetic dentists are able to repair teeth and, just as importantly, restore a natural and healthy look to your mouth and the surrounding bones and flesh.

Anyone who participates in sports or other active pastimes runs a risk of serious facial trauma. A helmet, mouth guard, or other piece of safety equipment can mitigate these risks, but oftentimes kids, hobbyists, and amateurs either can’t afford or disdain that kind of equipment — and they’re the ones who end up getting carried into the cosmetic dentist missing half of their mouth.

The smile is one of the most defining characteristics of the human face — when you have damage to your teeth, jaw, gums, cheeks, or lips, everyone knows, and everyone looks at you just a little funny. But the aesthetic concerns of oral damage are nothing compared to the long-term health problems that can arise from an injury like that.

• Without proper (and speedy) care, damage in the mouth tends to worsen rapidly. Bacteria are held off my a complex biochemical system in the mouth, and when that system goes awry, infections can take over in a matter of hours.
• A tooth that is knocked entirely out of it’s socket must be replaced by a skilled cosmetic dentist within an hour, or it will die and become useless.
• Studies show that oral health — including injuries — in the younger part of our lives have a direct relationship with our cardiac health later in life, which means failing to properly address oral trauma can lead (though science has yet to show how) to heart attacks down the road.

In short, if you’ve got a problem with your mouth, immediately seek a cosmetic dentist. Philadelphia has several — just get there fast.

1> YOUR DENTAL INSURANCES’ YEARLY MAXIMUM CAP

If you have a dental PPO insurance, you most probably have a yearly maximum cap. Insurance will only pay for your treatment up to that amount for that benefit year. Let’s say you have $1500 yearly maximum on your plan. Your insurance will only pay up to $1500 for your treatments. If you have used, for example, $900 and don’t get any further dental treatment for the rest of the benefit year, you will loose the remaining $600 at the end of the year. Next year you will have new $1500 cap but you will loose the $600 that you didn’t use this year. If you are in need of further dental treatments, you should get them done before the end of the year to maximize your insurance benefits. Why not use your insurance benefits for your dental treatment rather than giving it back to insurance company????

2> FLEX SPENDING ACCOUNT (FSA) / HEALTH SAVINGS ACCOUNT (HSA)

If you have a Flex Spending Account through your employer and you are contributing to it, we would like to remind that you should use it by the end of the year. Under the “Use it or loose it” rule, whatever money is left under your account at the end of the year goes wasted. It doesn’t carry over to next year. If your employer offers Flex Spending Account but you are not contributing to it, you should consider about it. It works something like this. For every paycheck, your contribution money gets deducted from your paycheck and deposited into your Flex Spending Account. These money is TAX DEDUCTIBLE. It means that you don’t pay payroll taxes on your contribution to Flex Spending Account. Now you can use that money in your account to pay for your medical and dental treatments. So if you were in 25% tax bracket, you are basically getting 25% OFF of your treatments. HOW GOOD IS THAT???

Look at the example below,

Total cost of dental treatment you need: $1000.00

Your actual cost if you paid for the treatment without Flex Spending Account: $1250.00 (you already paid 25% tax on $1000 which is $250)

Your actual cost if you paid for the treatment through Flex Spending Account: $1000.00 (considering you are in 25% tax bracket and hence you saved 25% by not paying payroll taxes)

Your saving by using Flex Spending Account: $250.00

If you don’t know if your employer offers Flex Spending Account, you should inquire with your employer asap. It could save you a lot of bucks if you are in need of dental or medical treatment.

Please call your dentist in Philadelphia if you have any questions.

The answer, as you’ve probably surmised, is yes — of course there is. It’s a good thing, too — Philly’s population isn’t exactly below the national average when it comes to people who have found ways to make their smile a bit unsightly. With minimally invasive cosmetic dentistry, those not-quite-pleasant grins can be perfected without the need to remove and replace significant amounts of each tooth’s structure.

Common cosmetic techniques used by the dentists of Philadelphia include:

• Laser Whitening — with laser whitening, your smile can be whitened up to eight shades in less than an hour with absolutely no damage to your mouth.
• Veneers — Veneers are ultrathin porcelain ‘sheaths’ that fit over your existing teeth, obscuring absolutely any amount of staining, yellowing, or other unsightly condition, and the only thing you have to do is snap them on when you want them and snap them off when you don’t.
• Laser Gum Cleaning — Using techniques similar to those for laser whitening but turning the lasers on your gums rather than your teeth, a cosmetic dentist can kill the bacteria that cause gum disease, all but eliminating the need for oral surgery.
• Dental Implants — There are dental implants that require invasive surgery, but there are also new kinds that don’t. Modern dental implants can be put right onto the existing damaged tooth, sometimes after grinding any severely damaged parts away.

Of course, the things that a cosmetic dentist can do with invasive surgeries are downright miraculous, and there should be absolutely no downplaying that fact — but for those people who are uninterested in or unable to have a traditional surgery performed, these non-invasive techniques can do a lot to restore a damaged smile.

Of course, for the ‘true’ vampire fanatic, wearing red and black and avoiding the sun isn’t nearly enough. For the truly hardcore, even veneer fangs aren’t enough to satisfy the need to master the inner darkness. That’s when, according to a few ‘vamps’ we’ve talked shop with, the masters of the darkness turn to dental implants. Philadelphia‘s undead have fangs that don’t come out, because they’re hand-made porcelain teeth that are actually surgically installed and are every bit as real as real teeth.

Fangs are the single most iconic part of the vampire myth — and virtually the only element of the vampiric experience that exists in every variation of the story. Whether you’re emulating the original Dracula or you’re hip enough to know a Toreador from a Nosferatu or you’re looking for that edgy, futuristic Blade/Ultraviolet feel, if you don’t have the oral accoutrements, you’re really just cosplaying.

There are two kinds of implants that you can get from a willing dentist in Philadelphia. The first and most common involves sealing a porcelain cap onto an existing tooth — usually after filing the tooth down quite a bit. The process can be painful, and once it’s performed, those teeth will always be fake — even if you decide later in life to get the fang-caps replaced with more traditional false teeth.

The most dedicated will opt for the second, significantly more expensive but irreversible implants — the “forever fangs”. In this operation, your canine teeth are physically removed entirely. Then titanium bolts are screwed into your jaw, and porcelain fangs are permanently attached to the bolts. Once you go this far, there’s no going back — you’d better be willing to have fangs in your face in your nursing home if you choose this path.

• The Mounting — the mounting of a dental implant is a titanium screw that is bolted into your mandible (for lower teeth) or your skull (for upper teeth).
• The Abutment — the abutment connects the crown to the mounting; typically made of metal or porcelain.
• The Crown — the ‘false tooth’ part of the implant is made of porcelain and is nearly indistinguishable from a normal tooth.

The construction of the implant is important because as far as the insurance companies are concerned, the installation of each element is a separate procedure. Some insurance companies will cover the crown, but not the abutment or the mounting. Others will cover the mounting and abutment, but arbitrarily consider the crown ‘cosmetic’ rather than of medical importance.

In order to find out if your insurance company will pay for a dental implant from a dentist in Philadelphia, you need to call them and ask if they cover the following medical codes:

• D6010: Surgical Placement of Implant
• D6020: Abutment Placement or Substitution
• D6750: Crown Porcelain Fused to High Noble Metal

For each of these, your insurance company will typically have a ‘coverage rate’ and a ‘maximum fee’. For example, you may find that you have a ‘coverage rate’ of 75% and a ‘maximum fee’ of $1200. What that means, in the end, is that your insurance company will cover up to $800 of that operation. It’s normal for a company to have different coverage rates and maximum fees for each of the three steps of the implant process, so you’ll have to ask about each one independently.

If you’ve tried at-home teeth whitening products, you’ve probably been disappointed. The at-home treatments are significantly weaker than the prescription level kinds the dentists used. They can take several weeks (and a dozen repetitions) to get the kind of result you can get from one hour with a Philadelphia dentist — and the cost of the OTC version is actually more expensive in the long run if you keep using them until you get a dentist-level result.

With 1 hour teeth whitening, the results are immediate, they last for months, and the process is actually safer for your gums and oral health than an over-the-counter treatment because it’s administered by a dental professional that knows his way around your mouth.

In the typical teeth whitening process, you will be sat down with your dentist. They’ll put a protective shield over your gums and then apply a gel to your teeth. A powerful laser-like light will be pointed at the gel, activating it, and you’ll have to sit still for just over half an hour. When all is said and done, the gel is carefully removed, the shields are taken off, and you’ll be given a mouthwash. The average result is an 8-shade improvement in tooth whiteness — about 8 times what you get from a typical over-the-counter treatment.

Professional 1-hour teeth whitening services are the epitome of speed and convenience. The cost usually runs about $300-$650, but again, a typical OTC whitening treatment will run you $60 and you’ll have to do it 8-12 times to get the same results, so you’re saving money in the long run by getting a professional whitening.

If you’ve never considered getting your teeth whitened, you’re in a pretty small minority. There are a lot of reasons people do — here are some of the best:

First Impressions
Having white teeth makes you want to smile, and that has a profound effect on your first encounters with people. Gleaming pearly whites stand out and speak of your attention to your appearance and your desire to be approachable. Hiding your smile can make you seem introverted, or worse, like you have more to hide. Taking an hour off to get your teeth whitened by a dentist in Philadelphia can have a huge positive impact on your first impressions.

Pictures and Memories
You could consider this the “Last Impressions” section. When you go back and look at your wedding pictures, vacation pictures, or other important memories, do you want to see yourself with a tight-lipped smile — or worse yet, a yellowed, stained grin? If you put in the modicum of effort it takes to get your teeth whitened before an important event, you’ll be able to smile wide with pride knowing that in a few decades when you look back at your pictures, you’ll see yourself at your best.

Personal Makeovers
There’s a lot to be gained by consciously making yourself over from time to time. By changing your appearance, you can give yourself a ‘reset button’ — using your makeover as a launchpad to change other areas of your life. Much like redecorating your home, the feeling you get from redecorating yourself is half freedom and have new opportunities. A complete teeth whitening along with the other changes can help you step further away from your old self.

Toothache
The most common reason anyone would find an emergency dentist, an emergency-level toothache isn’t just your ordinary pain. A serious toothache can bring a grown man to tears, and is often accompanied by a fever and/or swelling. Any toothache that hurts enough to make you change the way you go about your day is serious enough to take to an emergency dentist.

Broken Tooth
The moment you chip or crack a tooth, you should immediately make time to go an emergency dentist — waiting around for your next dentist’s appointment (unless it’s within 48 hours) is a bad idea. Save any pieces of the broken tooth: the dentist might not be able to reattach the broken pieces, but they’ll help him to model a veneer or other ceramic replacement.

Pulled/Lost Tooth
If you have an accident so severe that a tooth physically comes out of it’s socket, you have less than an hour to see an emergency dentist.Apply light gauze to the socket to absorb the blood and prevent scabbing. Immediately put the tooth into a glass of milk, or salt water if you don’t have milk, and take it to one of the emergency dentists of Philadelphia.

Failure of Previous Corrections
If you suddenly find that a filling, crown, or a part of your braces is floating around in your mouth, you should call your dentist and find out if he has time to work you in and get the correction repaired — and if he doesn’t, find an emergency dentist and get it done sooner rather than later.

Emergency dentists are those that will take a walk-in or call-just-before-you-walk-in “appointment” for patients that have sudden or dire problems with their teeth. Not every toothache, even if it’s quite painful, qualifies as a dental emergency.

Real Dental Emergencies
The most common reason someone rushes to an emergency dentist is that they just chipped, cracked, or lost a tooth because of a physical accident, whether it’s as massive as a car wreck or as simple as dropping a coffee mug on your front tooth (more common than you might think). In the case of a chipped or cracked tooth, the faster a dentist can get an enamel coating on it, the less bacteria can get into the gap and the less likely you are to get an infection. For a tooth that came out entirely, you have about an hour during which a skilled dentist can reattached it — after that, you’ll need to find someone who can do dental implants in Philadelphia.

The only other real reason to run to an emergency dentist is for extreme, debilitating pain. Aches and pains that are uncomfortable but not crippling should be addressed by your normal dentist — but if you have such pain that you cannot function normally, an emergency dentist is called for.

The Wrong Time to Call an Emergency Dentist
There are two wrong times to call an emergency dentist. The first is when you don’t have a dental emergency. The second is when you have a major emergency that includes a dental problem — the aforementioned auto wreck, for example. When you have a broken clavicle and nose in addition to your missing teeth, you’re far better off making for the ER rather than a dentist.