Dental Onlays & Inlays

If you’ve been involved in restorative dentistry before, you understand that undergoing the procedures involved with dental onlays and inlays isn’t always the most exciting task, and that the damage done to your teeth that led up to needing onlays wasn’t the best experience either. The damage and decay caused by bad oral hygiene and disease can lead to a mess of complications and excruciating pain. Thankfully, with Westgate Smiles’s team of compassionate and understanding professionals, we have many ways we can help to alleviate the pain of a decaying tooth while working towards repairing the damage that’s causing it in the first place.

About Onlays

Better known as indirect fillings, dental inlays and onlays are what dentists use in place of old-fashioned fillings. They are generally more resilient to everyday use, are easier to clean, and dentists can usually use more materials with inlays and onlays than they can with any other dental procedure. They also have a greater resistance to decay, which helps the overall longevity of onlays and inlays once they are applied. CEREC onlays are different because they take up considerably less time than regular onlays due to the CEREC software used to create a filling. They can be completed in one visit.

What Is The Difference?

They are all looked at as solutions when repairing breaks, chips, and cracks in your teeth, but each procedure has its own unique benefits:

  • Dental Inlays: Concentrates on the center and chewing portions of the tooth where resin is filled in to help with structural damage.

  • Dental Onlays: Focuses on the cusps of the affected tooth, and usually only used when by dentists when damage and decay are widespread.

  • CEREC Onlays: This is another extension of onlays that is used to help repair broken, decayed and fractured teeth, for the use of cosmetic augmentation, and to repair fractured fillings.

One of the most cost effective positives about onlays and inlays is their durability. If you properly care for your dental onlays and inlays, they can last you up to thirty years or more in use. If you’ve made several trips to the dentist in recent years for various types of cosmetic detailing, this can make all the difference in your budget. We encourage all of our patients to practice oral hygiene daily to reduce the amount of time they have to spend beneath a dental drill.