My Teeth Are Really Worn Down From Grinding. Is There Somebody in Naples Who Specializes in Fixing That?

Yes. And if your teeth are severely worn down from years of grinding, I’d be careful about treating this as a simple cosmetic problem.

When somebody tells me, “My teeth used to be a lot longer,” or “It feels like I’ve ground my teeth down to nothing,” my first question isn’t what color they want their new teeth to be.

I want to know why they wore down in the first place.

That matters.

Because if you put beautiful new dentistry on top of the same forces that destroyed the original teeth, you can end up right back where you started.

Worn teeth are usually a bigger problem than they look

Grinding can slowly change your entire smile.

The front teeth get shorter. Edges start chipping. Back teeth flatten out. Sometimes cracks develop. Old fillings and crowns may start breaking. Eventually, people notice that their bite doesn’t feel the way it used to.

And because it happens gradually, a lot of patients don't realize how much tooth structure they've actually lost.

They just know their smile looks different.

Sometimes they’ll come in asking about veneers because they want their teeth to look longer again.

Maybe veneers are part of the answer. Maybe they aren't.

If the wear is extensive, I’m looking at the entire bite.

This is where full-mouth reconstruction comes in

For badly worn teeth, treatment can involve rebuilding multiple teeth together rather than fixing one tooth at a time.

Dentists sometimes call this full-mouth reconstruction. At our office, you may also hear us talk about a Total Smile Rejuvenation.

The basic idea is pretty straightforward: restore the teeth that have been damaged while rebuilding the smile and bite in a way that makes sense as a whole.

Depending on the patient, that might involve crowns, veneers, implants, bonding or a combination of treatments.

Some teeth may need very little work. Others may be too damaged to predictably save.

There isn't one standard treatment plan for “grinders.”

I wouldn't decide what you need from a photograph

This is one of those situations where an exam matters.

I want to see how much tooth structure is left. I want to see how your teeth come together. I want to look for cracks, old dental work, missing teeth and anything else that changes the equation.

Then we can talk about options.

Sometimes the treatment is much smaller than the patient expected.

Sometimes somebody has spent years repairing individual broken teeth and what actually makes more sense is stepping back and rebuilding the bite as a whole.

That's the part I enjoy figuring out.

Can worn-down teeth actually look normal again?

In many cases, yes.

We're often working with patients whose teeth have become substantially shorter than they once were. Rebuilding them can change much more than the color of the smile. We're restoring tooth shape and proportion too.

The goal isn't to give somebody a mouth full of giant white teeth.

I want the finished result to look like it belongs to that person.

And just as important, we need to think about what caused the damage and how we're going to protect the new dentistry afterward.

If you're in Naples and your teeth are badly worn down

This is the type of case I evaluate at Mouritsen Dental Studio.

If you've been grinding for years, your teeth are getting shorter, things keep breaking, or you've been told you need extensive dental work, the first step is simply figuring out what's actually happening.

You don't need to know whether you need crowns, veneers, implants or a full-mouth reconstruction before you come in.

That's my job.

Dr. Bradly J. Mouritsen, DMD

Mouritsen Dental Studio

Naples, Florida