General Dentistry

Keep your best smile with general dentistry.
If you want to maintain a healthy, beautiful smile at every age and avoid unnecessary dental issues and pain, adding general dentistry to your self-care routine is key. When combined with consistent at-home hygiene, general dentistry can help you bypass the financial, emotional, and energetic costs of having to treat advanced diseases and disorders of the teeth, gums, jaws, and mouth. Even with the best oral hygiene and lifestyle habits, oral health issues can still take root, without obvious signs or symptoms.

Whether you’ve got an oral health concern or simply want to keep your smile healthy and radiant, Millennium Dental is here to compassionately and efficiently meet your needs with premium general dentistry and preventative care. Dr. Harrison and her team can help you prevent, identify, and treat common oral health issues, like cavities, surface stains, periodontal disease, oral cancer, tooth fractures, sleep apnea, and bruxism, before they begin or in their earliest and most treatable stages.

“Had my cleaning done and my hygienist did an excellent job. Also had the opportunity to discuss some concerns. Dr. Harrison was extremely good in addressing those concerns. Very good experience. The whole staff is efficient and friendly.”

• ALMA V.

Preventive Care

As most of the conditions that negatively affect your smile can be avoided, preventive care is one of the best choices you can make to keep your smile bright, strong, and healthy for life. Your team at Millennium Dental is committed to providing you with the most advanced preventive dentistry, so you can avoid the negative impacts of tooth decay, periodontitis, enamel erosion, and other preventable oral and overall health issues.

During your twice-annual visits, Dr. Harrison and her team combine advanced dental technology with gentle techniques to monitor the health of your oral tissues, deeply clean and polish your teeth, and identify oral health issues in their earliest stages. Depending on your unique situation and needs, Dr. Harrison will also provide personalized guidance on professional treatments you may need for your best oral and overall health, such as periodontal therapy, sports mouth guards, and nightguards for bruxism.

Preventive Fluoride Therapy

Fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral that’s renowned for its ability to support your smile’s well-being. Though natural sources of fluoride in food aren’t generally potent enough to provide its full range of benefits, the professional strength of preventive fluoride therapy can help you prevent cavities, remineralize your teeth, and even reverse the earliest stages of tooth decay.

Dr. Harrison may suggest in-office fluoride therapy or an at-home fluoride gel or rinse. Under the skilled guidance of our dental team, in-office fluoride therapy safely delivers a concentrated dose of fluoride to heal weakened tooth enamel, while at-home fluoride therapy uses a lower dose to maintain your teeth’s resilience and strength. Because they’re applied topically, both in-office and at-home preventive fluoride therapy are directly absorbed into your teeth for maximum results and benefits.

Sealants

Dental sealants are a simple and non-invasive dental treatment that can help you or your child prevent tooth decay on your back teeth (premolars and molars), where cavities are most common. Made of clear body-safe plastic, sealants coat and protect the chewing surfaces of your premolars and molars, which are textured with small crevices that can easily capture food and bacterial debris. When combined with daily brushing and routine dental visits, dental sealants can prevent up to 80% of cavities of the back teeth and only have to be replaced every six to eight years. Children especially benefit from dental sealants, as they’re still developing their oral hygiene habits and proper brushing techniques.

Oral Cancer Screening

Cancers of the mouth and throat (oral and pharyngeal cancers) impact tens of thousands of Americans every year, with one in four cases proving fatal. Symptoms are often mild to non-existent, which makes oral and pharyngeal cancers difficult or impossible to detect on one’s own. Though, as with all forms of cancer, early detection is exactly what’s needed for the best treatment outcomes and survival rates. In fact, early detection is so effective, survival rates improve from 65% to 85% when patients are diagnosed before the disease progresses to a later stage and spreads to surrounding tissues.

As your primary oral healthcare physician, Dr. Harrison is committed to providing this life-saving screening at every routine dental visit with the help of Identafi, an advanced oral cancer screening technology. Identafi uses multispectral and three-wavelength technology to identify microscopic abnormalities in the cells of your mouth, throat, tongue, and tonsils, even before they’re considered cancerous.

Fillings

Tooth decay is by far the most common oral health disease, impacting over 90% of American adults at some point in their lives. For most of modern dentistry, tooth decay has been repaired with silver-colored amalgam fillings. Though generally effective at treating cavities, amalgam fillings are far from aesthetically pleasing and require more of your healthy tooth structure to be removed to accommodate the filling.

To help you maintain a smile that’s as beautiful as it is strong and healthy, Dr. Harrison exclusively uses composite resin for cavity treatment. Also known as tooth-colored fillings, composite resin is a durable material that bonds to your teeth, which means less healthy tooth structure needs to be removed during treatment. Dr. Harrison will precisely match your filling to your natural teeth, maintaining your smile’s natural appearance while sealing out bacteria, preventing temperature sensitivity, and reinforcing your tooth’s natural strength. Like your natural teeth, composite resin can become discolored when exposed to staining foods and drinks, like red wine, coffee, and tea. Daily oral hygiene habits and routine dental visits can help ensure your filling maintains its durability and shade. You may also consider dental sealants, to better preserve your filling and prevent future tooth decay.

Tooth Extractions

Helping you keep your natural teeth for life is one of the main goals of general dentistry, though there are cases when tooth extraction is the best option for improving and preserving your oral health and well-being. For instance, if a tooth is broken, loose, or diseased beyond repair, a tooth extraction will prevent further issues and pain, and make it possible for you to replace your tooth with a dental implant or bridge. A tooth extraction can also address past-due baby teeth in children, remove wisdom teeth that are causing or may cause complications, and prepare the mouth for successful orthodontic treatment.

Tooth extraction is an outpatient surgical procedure that will be performed under one or more types of anesthetics for a calm and comfortable treatment experience. If your tooth is visible and intact, Dr. Harrison will carefully loosen and remove the targeted tooth (called a simple extraction). If your tooth is fully or partially below the gumline or broken, Dr. Harrison will first make a small incision into your gums and, if needed, remove a small amount of bone tissue or divide the tooth into smaller pieces before removing the targeted tooth and closing the incision with stitches (called a surgical extraction).

Feeling a bit anxious about tooth extraction is normal, though Dr. Harrison and her team specialize in creating comfortable, positive dental experiences through transparent communication, gentle techniques, and sedation dentistry for qualified patients.

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