A guide to restoring smiles back to peak health, beauty with conservative inlays and onlays

At High Forest Dental, your happiness is our peak priority. Led by Dr. Allison Brown, our team in Littleton, Colorado, supports happy smiles and a pleasant process of maintaining or restoring healthy, beautiful teeth and gums with conservative (tooth-preserving) procedures. We have enlisted advanced technologies as the perfect complement to our kind, nonjudgmental, and highly knowledgeable team. 

Dental inlays and onlays

Inlays and onlays fit in well with our approaches for utmost comfort and patient satisfaction with their new and improved teeth! These restorative dentistry treatments are designed to be a more conservative alternative to full crowns. They may be an ideal option for patients whose teeth have sustained less extensive damage. 

Planned and designed to address your unique needs and made from the most attractive and durable dental materials, each inlay or onlay is applied and seamlessly fitted to the existing prepared tooth structure. Once secured to the tooth, it should look and feel no different from the surrounding tooth or neighboring unaltered and healthy teeth. Additionally, inlays and onlays can help prevent the need for future dental treatments. By preserving the natural tooth structure, they can also help prevent tooth loss.

What to expect

Dr. Brown may determine that you are a good candidate for an inlay or onlay if a cavity is too big to be adequately protected or strengthened with a simple filling alone. Patients with less tooth structure to bond the dental material to may be candidates for dental onlays instead. Also known as partial crowns, onlays are an alternative to crowns. 

Dental crowns cover a tooth weakened by decay or other trauma. They may also be the only way to “save” an infected tooth that is preserved with root canal therapy. The crown is the last step in the treatment process. We can make these and other restorations at High Forest Dental in just one visit with Glidewell.io (same-day crown) technologies. 

Inlays and onlays differ in notable ways. After the tooth has been numbed for utmost comfort, Dr. Brown will:

• Place and secure an inlay inside the reshaped and cleaned tooth; the inlay fits inside the cusps or points and resides in the grooved surface of the tooth.
• Apply and cement an onlay to both the grooved area of the tooth and at least one of the cusps. 

Generally, conservative procedures are associated with a less aggressive, minimally invasive, natural-looking, and more durable treatment outcome. This benefit of tooth-preserving processes is due to our maximizing “what nature intended”: natural tooth structure. The more natural tissue preserved, the better off the patient will be, as these techniques optimally mimic the aesthetics, feel, and function of healthy teeth. 

Do not hold on to hurting, broken teeth. We can give you your most brilliant smile back, and we do so in a comfortable and stress-free way. Call (303) 951-3717 with questions or to schedule an appointment at High Forest Dental in Littleton, CO.