Our Approach
We pride ourselves on maintaining and adapting modern dentistry techniques to provide the best possible care for our patients.
Minimal intervention dentistry
Our practice philosophy revolves around preserving your natural tooth structure wherever possible. Where tooth structure is damaged and requires replacement, we strive to ensure that the replacements match the natural tooth as much as possible in structure and function.
We have a strong focus on preventative care, both home / self-care and preventative treatments in a clinical setting. There are a number of problems when picked up early, can be reversed using preventative treatments and may not end up requiring fillings or other operative care. Regular oral health examinations are important to ensure dental problems can be picked up at an early stage.
Rubber Dam
Rubber Dam isolation is the gold standard when it comes to isolating teeth for adhesive dentistry procedures. These procedures include placing composite fillings (white fillings), repair of fractured teeth, preparing and bonding ceramic crowns, bridges and veneers. At Tooth Doctor, we use rubber dams for all these procedures where ever possible.
Rubber dam isolation allows adequate isolation of teeth from saliva, gingival crevicular fluid, gingival bleeding and water vapour from breathing allowing the creation of the dry field required for bonding of resin-based materials used in dentistry today.
The use of a rubber dam also increases your comfort during the procedure as it keeps water from the handpiece above the rubber dam and out of the back of your mouth.
During endodontic (root canal) procedures the use of rubber dams is absolutely essential. We use rubber dam isolation for all endodontic procedures.
Dental Photography
Clinical Photography is fast becoming commonplace in clinical dentistry today. It enables you to visualize exactly what is going on in your mouth in high resolution on a widescreen. We routinely obtain clinical photos of your teeth. During your initial examination, we will obtain a full baseline set of photos. These photos are updated as changes occur in your mouth.
It allows for more conservative management of dental conditions by creating an accurate high-resolution picture that can be used to track changes over time thus avoiding the need for unnecessary dental work.
We use a DSLR camera with a macro lens and ring flash to enable our clinicians to capture high- resolution images of your teeth.
Cross Infection Control
Your safety is of utmost importance to us. We comply with NZDC Infection Prevention and Control Standards. These standards cover cleaning and reprocessing of our instruments, surface and biofilm management, and testing and monitoring of equipment.
All critical instruments are labelled with a cycle identifier so that we are able to track the exact cycle parameters of the sterilization cycle that that particular instrument went through as well as the person who validated the cycle.
All of our equipment undergo daily testing protocols to ensure that they are performing as it should be.
