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Because if you leave any decay behind, it'll spread and wreak havoc on your tooth. It's like a rust spot on the body of your car, it slowly spreads and eats away until you have an actual hole.

Make sure all the decay is removed before the filling takes place. It's very important to make sure your dentist is extremely thorough. Get references before choosing your dentist. You can never be too careful when you search.

I had a bad toothache, so I went to the dentist, he did an x-ray and we saw a dark area in that tooth. He went in, scraped it out and sent me on my way.

A year or 2 later I started experiencing pain in the same tooth again but I ignored it because that was the tooth that had supposedly been fixed. Also, I had moved, so finding a new dentist was not something I was anxious to do. Eventually the pain got so bad though that I just had to go.

What the new dentist found was that the first dentist had left a little decay behind, and this decay had spread all the way around the filling from the inside! It had a horse-shoe shape to it. To my relief this new dentist told me "Fortunately the tooth is large enough where I can remove the filling, scrape out the new decay and still have enough of a healthy shell to fill again. So you don't need a root canal". (sorry, this is going to get a little graphic). There was so much decay that I could actually smell it when he started drilling and scraping!

Here's where having a good dentist pays off. That new dentist did such a good job that even though I let another 5 years go by without getting a cleaning, I went in the just the other day and was told that, besides a small filling and some coffee stains, my teeth were perfect! 5 years!

I do brush, floss and scope regularly, but 5 years of negligence should have resulted in many more problems than just that. Again, you can never be too careful when you search for a dentist.

Learn more about this author, Peter Johns.
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