Tooth-Colored Composite, Not Metal
We use composite resin for our fillings. It’s a durable, tooth-colored material that bonds directly to your tooth, and it has real advantages over the silver amalgam fillings many of our patients grew up with.
Composite requires less removal of healthy tooth structure, because it bonds to the tooth rather than relying on a mechanical undercut to stay in place. It doesn’t expand and contract with temperature the way metal does, which over years can contribute to cracks. And it matches your tooth — shaded to your surrounding enamel so that a filled tooth looks like an unfilled one.
Replacing Old Metal Fillings
We replace old amalgam fillings when it’s clinically necessary — when a filling is fractured, leaking, worn down, or has new decay developing underneath or around it.
We want to be straightforward about this: we don’t recommend removing sound, functioning metal fillings simply because they’re metal. A filling that’s doing its job is best left alone. When one genuinely needs to be replaced, we’ll show you why on the intra-oral camera before we touch anything.
You’ll See Your Own Tooth, Before and After
This is something we do on every filling, and patients consistently tell us it’s the part they didn’t expect.
We use an intra-oral camera to photograph your tooth before treatment and again afterward. You’ll see the decay as we found it and the finished restoration side by side — on a screen, at actual scale, not a stock illustration of somebody else’s mouth.
It changes the conversation. Rather than being told you need a filling, you can see the reason for yourself and decide with real information in front of you.
What to Expect
Most fillings take well under an hour. We’ll numb the area thoroughly first — our clinicians use specific techniques to make injections as comfortable as possible, and if dental work makes you anxious, nitrous oxide–oxygen conscious sedation is available. Just tell us when you schedule.
We remove the decay, clean and prepare the tooth, place the composite in layers, cure it, then shape and polish the restoration so it feels natural when you bite down. You may have some sensitivity to hot and cold for a few days afterward. That’s normal and typically resolves on its own.
When a Filling Isn’t Enough
Sometimes decay has progressed further than a filling can address. If too much tooth structure has been lost, a filling won’t have enough healthy tooth to hold onto, and a crown is the better restoration. If decay has reached the nerve, root canal treatment may be needed first.
We’ll tell you plainly which situation you’re in, and we won’t place a filling we expect to fail in two years just to avoid a harder conversation. Learn about dental crowns →
