Mouth guards

If you play contact sports, mouth guards are a necessary piece of equipment. From football, soccer and basketball to hockey, lacrosse, wrestling and even baseball, if you play a sport where contact is possible, you should wear a mouth guard to protect your teeth. Here at Prairie Hawk Dental, Dr. Aaron Goodman can provide you with a custom mouth guard to protect your jaw, cheeks, teeth, tongue and lips.

 

Mouth guards are essential for protecting your teeth and jaw against structural damage and your tongue and lips against lacerations. They have also been known to decrease the risk of concussions during sports.

 

While you can buy mouth guards in most sporting goods stores, you should be wary of these. They can be ill-fitting and uncomfortable and unlikely to offer you the best level of protection. If you want to protect your mouth during sports, a custom mouth guard from Dr. Goodman offers the highest level of protection. Created specifically for you the mouth guard is made with a thin plastic that is hardened after being custom fit to your mouth. Its thinness allows you to breathe easier, which is important when playing team sports.

 

To ensure that you perform at your best and are protected on the field, rink or court, schedule an appointment at our office in Castle Rock, CO by calling 720-515-1801. For more information, visit www.PrairieHawkDental.com. 

Inlays and Onlays

Inlays and onlays are two procedures that use the tooth structure as a base for restoration. Often called partial crowns, both inlays and onlays strengthen the tooth while restoring its shape and working to prevent further damage. At Prairie Hawk Dental, we use these procedures to repair teeth when decay is too extensive to support a filling but not bad enough to use a crown.

 

When there is no damage to the cusps of a tooth, Dr. Aaron Goodman uses an inlay, bonding it right on top of the tooth. Made of porcelain, inlays are both strong and natural-looking, providing an attractive solution to repairing your tooth. Onlays are used when damage is a little more extensive and are used to repair part of the cusp of the tooth.

 

Inlays and onlays can be created with a CEREC machine, which creates crowns, inlays, onlays and veneers right in the office. Because the machine uses compressed porcelain, inlays and onlays are even stronger than those that come from a laboratory.

 

To ensure that your teeth get the best care with up-to-date technology, schedule an appointment with our office in Castle Rock, CO by calling 720-515-1801. For more information, visit www.PrairieHawkDental.com. 

Sealants

Although brushing and flossing is effective at removing food particles and plaque from the smooth surfaces of our teeth, sometimes these methods are ineffective at thoroughly cleaning the nooks and crannies in our premolars and molars. Because molars are the hardest to clean and the ones most used in the chewing process, they are the teeth most susceptible to cavities and decay, which is why at Prairie Hawk Dental we recommend sealants soon after molars emerge, when children are between the ages of 6 and 14.

 

Dental sealants are a thin, plastic coating applied to the chewing surfaces of molars to prevent cavities and tooth decay. The sealant is applied by the dentist, who first roughens the surface of the molar with acid and then paints on the sealant, which bonds into the depressions and grooves of the teeth, hardening and forming a shield over the enamel to protect it for approximately 10 years.

While normally applied to children’s molars, whose teeth are especially susceptible to cavities, Dr. Aaron Goodman will also sometimes apply sealants on adult molars if they have hard-to-clean grooves that are causing cavities.

 

To schedule an appointment, call our office in Castle Rock, CO at 720-515-1801. For more information, you can also visit www.PHawkDental.com. 

Bridges

If you have had a tooth extracted due to damage, decay or disease, it is important to have the resulting gap filled or your remaining teeth can shift out of position. When this happens, your teeth become more susceptible to disease and decay. At Prairie Hawk Dental, we can help keep your smile beautiful and functional with dental bridges.

 

Called a bridge because it literally creates a bridge to cross the area where your tooth is missing, this prosthetic tooth replacement is usually made from gold, metal, alloys or porcelain to ensure a strong and durable smile that can last more than a decade if properly cared for.

 

The process of creating a bridge takes two visits to our office. In the first, Dr. Aaron Goodman will create abutments out of the existing teeth on both sides of your missing tooth. This is where the bridge will be attached. After the abutments are in place, a mold is made of your mouth for creating the bridge, which will fit and feel as close to your natural teeth as possible. The bridge will consist of two crowns, which will be fixed to the abutments, and a pontic, which is the prosthetic that will replace your missing tooth. We provide you with a temporary bridge while your permanent one is crafted in the lab. On the second visit, the permanent bridge will then be fixed to the abutments with an adhesive.

 

For more information, call our office in Castle Rock, CO by calling 720-515-1801. You can also visit www.PHawkDental.com.