Family Dentistry
Family Dentistry
A Dental Home for the Whole Family
Nurture a Healthy Smile with Family Dentistry
Integrating preventative care and treatment for the most common dental diseases, family dentistry can help you, your partner, and your children experience a strong, healthy, and beautiful smile at every age. Dixon, Boles, and Associates proudly offers complete and comprehensive family dentistry, including preventative care, baby’s first visits, fillings, root canals, crowns, periodontal therapy, and sports mouthguards for adults, teens, and kids.
Best dentist office ever! My entire family goes here and have always received excellent care & treatment. Staff is absolutely awesome! Very courteous, friendly & compassionate.
BRIAN L.
Preventative Care
The cornerstone of family dentistry, preventative care aims to prevent and detect common dental issues, like cavities, gum disease, and fractures, before they happen or in their earliest stages. Alongside daily oral hygiene habits, preventative care is a branch of dentistry that enables you to keep your smile bright, strong, and healthy for life.
Our practice combines safe, modern diagnostic techniques with a gentle touch to assess the health of your or your child’s gums and teeth, identify issues in their earliest stages, remove unsightly plaque and tartar, provide personalized oral health tips, and leave your smile clean, bright, and polished.
baby's first visit
Along with lighting up your life with wonder and joy, your child’s smile is invaluable to their immediate and long-term oral and overall health and development. To ensure your child’s smile is developing correctly and to establish a positive association with oral health and dentistry early, our dentists along with the American Dental Association and the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry recommend that your baby has their first dental visit by their first birthday or within six months of their first tooth erupting (whichever comes first).
During your baby’s first visit, your child’s dentist will review your baby’s health history and respond to any questions or concerns you may have about your child’s oral health and development. While you hold your baby in the dental chair, your child’s dentist will gently examine their jaws and any teeth that have erupted. Our dental hygiene team will then carefully clean any teeth and provide developmentally specific guidance on how you can best care for your baby’s smile in between visits.
what to expect at your first visit
From adults to babies and everyone in between, we love welcoming new patients to our practice. During your first visit, our front office team will check you in and finalize any paperwork before our team of dental assistants and hygienists take X-rays (radiographs), evaluate your gums and teeth, and create a plan for a professional dental cleaning at your next visit.
Your dentist will perform a comprehensive evaluation on your teeth, gums, and oral tissues at the first visit. This allows the dentist to talk with you about your oral health goals and make a plan of action moving forward for any issues. Once your visit with the dentist is complete, our front office staff will work with you to complete any additional paperwork and schedule you for your next appointment to complete your professional dental cleaning.
Dental Fillings
While learning you have a cavity can feel distressing at first, you can restore your smile’s beauty and integrity with tooth-colored fillings or a lifelike porcelain overlay. Unlike the silver-colored amalgam fillings that have been used for most of dentistry’s history, tooth-colored fillings and porcelain overlays maintain your smile’s natural appearance while ensuring your teeth are protected from further damage and decay.
tooth-colored fillings
Tooth-colored fillings are made of composite resin, which your dentist will perfectly match to the shade of your natural teeth, and cured with a special light for a strong seal against further tooth decay. Unlike amalgam fillings, tooth-colored fillings bond to your teeth and won’t contract and expand with temperature changes. Because they require less of your healthy tooth structure to be removed, tooth-colored fillings allow you to treat cavities while maintaining your smile’s natural appearance and integrity.
porcelain inlays
Porcelain inlays are custom-made dental restorations that are ideal for repairing a tooth that has been damaged by decay on the top, identented portion of the tooth. Made right in our office using CEREC technology, porcelain inlays are a long-lasting restoration designed to blend perfectly with your tooth structure and shade.
Dental Crowns
Made of tooth-colored zirconia or gold, dental crowns are tooth-shaped coverings that fully encase a tooth that is decayed or damaged to prevent future complications and pain while restoring your smile’s appearance and function. For the most comfortable experience and an accurate fit, our practice uses intraoral scanners to take digital impressions, which are sent to a specialized dental laboratory, where your custom crown will be created for a long-lasting restoration that fits just right. Your dentist will fit your tooth with a temporary crown to protect your tooth while your permanent crown is being created.
zirconia crowns
Ideal for correcting more visible teeth, zirconia crowns offer the strength of metal with a completely natural-looking appearance that matches the color and sheen of your teeth.
gold crowns
As they’re incredibly reliable, durable, and long-lasting, gold crowns are often ideal for correcting back teeth, where the forces of chewing are greatest.
Root Canals
Though severe tooth decay or damage significantly increases your risk of a serious infection or tooth loss, root canal therapy can prevent further complications and help preserve your natural teeth. Our family dentists have over 35 years of experience in providing root canals to the Wilson community and are here to help you restore your smile’s comfort, health, and beauty.
when is a root canal necessary?
The core of your tooth is filled with delicate living tissue and nerves (called pulp), which can become irritated, inflamed, or infected when you have deep decay caused by cavities, loose fillings, or chips and cracks in your teeth. Left untreated, the infection can spread to other parts of your face and neck, trigger facial swelling and pain, cause jawbone loss around the tip of the tooth, and, in the worst case scenario, cause a life-threatening infection called sepsis to spread to your bloodstream.
root canal process
During root canal therapy, you’ll receive local anesthesia to make you comfortable before one of our dentists carefully makes a small access hole in your tooth and gently removes decay and damaged tissue. Your dentist will use a sterile solution to remove debris and bacteria before sealing your tooth to prevent further decay. Once root canal therapy is complete, your dentist will likely recommend a custom dental crown to reinforce your tooth and fully restore your smile’s function and strength.
Periodontal Therapy
Gum disease is an inflammatory condition that’s caused when plaque and bacteria aren’t properly and regularly removed from your teeth through daily hygiene and routine dental visits. Plaque eventually hardens into calculus, a crusty deposit that will irritate your gums until it’s removed professionally. Along with causing bad breath and gums that are red, swollen, or bleed easily, untreated periodontal disease can cause your gums to recede from your teeth, become loose or fall out, and contribute to serious health conditions, like heart disease, diabetes, and poor pregnancy outcomes.
Our team can help you effectively treat gum disease with a form of periodontal therapy called root planing and scaling, or deep cleaning. Once you’re comfortable after a local anesthetic, your hygienist will remove calculus and plaque from the roots of your teeth and from the pockets between your gums and your teeth. Once your teeth have been cleaned, your hygienist will use a sterile solution to remove bacteria and any debris and provide you with personalized guidance on how you can help prevent periodontal disease from recurring or worsening using diligent daily hygiene and routine dental visits.
Sports Mouth Guards
If you or your child plays contact sports, a well-fitted and properly fabricated sports mouthguard will cushion your jaw, protect all of your teeth, and prevent the upper and lower teeth from being forced together upon an upward impact. Along with providing the best fit, a custom sports mouthguard enables you to speak and breathe freely. Our practice offers ArmourBite® by UnderArmour, which is made from a durable, odorless, and tasteless plastic that is customizable and easy to care for and clean. With regular use, your sports mouthguard can significantly reduce your risk of a severe dental injury, including chips, breaks, tooth loss, jaw fractures, and cuts on the insides of the lips and cheeks.
Contact sports are any activity where there’s a chance your or your child’s face will make contact with another player, a ball, a stick, or the ground, such as:
- Baseball
- Basketball
- Boxing
- Gymnastics
- Hockey
- Football
- Lacrosse
- Martial arts
- Mountain biking
- Rugby
- Skateboarding
- Skiing
- Soccer
- Softball
- Snowboarding
- Volleyball
- Wrestling
Set Your Smile Free
Compassionate modern dentistry for your best dental experience. Request your appointment today!