At Mesquite Dental Suite, our priority is to improve our patients lives by improving their dental health. Your physical and mental well-being depend on many aspects of your life, and one of them is your oral health. When you put off dental care, the result can be cavities, infections, gum disease and even tooth loss. At our Mesquite dental clinic, our dentist works hard to make our patients feel comfortable in the dentist chair so that they can receive the general dentistry care they need such as fillings, wisdom teeth extractions, teeth replacement and other procedures.
To that end, we offer not only general dentistry services, but also cosmetic dentistry services such as teeth whitening, dental veneers and orthodontic solutions such as Invisalign. A beautiful smile helps you feel more confident and raises your self-esteem, and our dentist wants to help you become your best self.
Dr. Jansen grew up in Iowa and received her undergraduate degree in Chemistry and Health Sciences from the University of South Dakota where she ran Division I Track. Inspired by having her front tooth knocked out during a basketball game, she went back to Iowa and received her DDS from the University of Iowa Dental School.
Dr. Jansen then moved to the Dallas area, where after falling in love with the people and the area, decided to open her own dental practice. She has completed advanced training in Implant Dentistry, has extensive experience in providing emergency dental care, and is one of the few dentists in the area certified in oral sedation.
In the past if you wanted to have straight teeth, you needed to go through the process of having your teeth banded and bracketed so you could wear traditional wire-braces. Improvements in technology, however, have allowed us, in many cases, to move teeth without the need for braces.
The concept behind Invisalign is straightforward we first determine with you where we want your teeth to be when we are done with your treatment. And in order to reach this goal, you wear a consecutive series of aligners that each serve to carefully move your teeth into the proper position. The only thing you have to wear is the small, esthetic, temporary bondings we add to your teeth in order to hold the aligners in place.
Treatment time with Invisalign can vary, but generally speaking, treatment is completed faster with Invisalign vs. treatment with traditional braces. Please recognize, however, that the duration of your Invisalign treatment is ultimately dependent upon your specific treatment needs; moving more teeth with more complex movements will naturally take longer than moving fewer teeth with simple movements.
Invisalign is designed for correcting minor teeth rotations, shifts, spacing problems and crowding. And while there are many, many use cases for it, we cant use Invisalign in cases where significant and complete movement of all the teeth is indicated.
One of the best features of using Invisalign is that the aligners are clear, so that people wont know that you are in orthodontic treatment, and when you smile for a picture, you wont see metal braces!
A dental veneer is a thin piece of porcelain that is used to change the shape, color, or size of a tooth or a group of teeth. Veneers are most often done on the front teeth of the upper and lower jaws, but can be used for premolars (the teeth behind the canines) if the patient has a wide smile and the color difference would show.
While a veneer can technically be used as a restoration on a single tooth, its rare that we veneer a single tooth because getting the proper color match of a single veneer to your natural teeth is extremely difficult. In these cases, a crown or all-ceramic crown may be a better option.
Patients who want to straighten their teeth or change the position of their teeth, often ask whether treatment with veneers can be used instead of orthodontic treatment. The answer is it depends. In dentistry we have a number of techniques and treatment modalities that we can use to achieve a goal and each patients needs and goals are different. For example, if someone has extensive crowding of their teeth along with severe rotations of their teeth, then orthodontic treatment may be the best choice. However, if a patient has a single front tooth that is too far forward or back, Invisalign might be a better option because you would need to prepare (drill) multiple teeth to get the same effect with veneers. If a patient, however, has multiple discolored teeth with slight rotations or irregular heights, then treatment with veneers might be a good choice.
Veneers are made of a thin strip of porcelain, and like any other porcelain, veneers can fracture. If a veneer fractures we may be able to repair it, but more often than not a patient with a fractured veneer will need a new veneer. And while we can come close to the color match of the previous and/or other exiting veneers, no color match is as ideal as the original set of veneers or the original veneer. This is the reason why we often prefer to use ceramic crowns instead of veneers for single teeth.