A Guide For Patients
You go to your dentist for your biannual check-up, only to hear your dentist start talking to their assistant about needing a friction grip bur. This may lead you to wonder what exactly a bur is.
In short, if dental teams didn’t have burs, there wouldn’t be a whole lot that they could do when it comes to cleaning your teeth and giving you fillings. So, to clue you in on what dental burs are, this article breaks down their role in dentistry, from basic dental care all the way to cosmetic work. Enjoy!
What Are Dental Burs?
Have you ever gotten a drill to hang some pictures in your home and realized that the drill piece was the wrong size for the job? So, you take the drill piece out and fit a new one. Imagine this, but on a much smaller scale, and you have an idea of what a dental bur is. As this is the ultimate guide to dental burs, they will be summed up simply: a dental bur is a rotary device that is placed onto the handpiece used by your dentist, and they are designed to cut through enamel or bone. Going back to hearing your dentist as the assistant for a friction grip bur, they were probably looking to begin prepping for a filling.
Burs Used For Fillings
If you need to have a filling, there are set burs that your dental team will use to cut into the enamel and dentin to clean the tooth. The most common ones include round burs, tapered burs, diamond burs (a bur covered with industrial diamonds), and inverted cone burs. These are all designed to remove decay and damage from a tooth by drilling it out, leaving your dentist with a clean tooth to begin filling. You won’t feel a thing! These bur heads are tiny, and your dental team will have numbed you, so that oral cavity will soon be a thing of the past.
Burs Used For Cosmetics
In the last few years, cosmetic dental care has jumped in popularity, and as there is a lot of smoothing and cleaning involved in the early stages of cosmetic dental care, there are a set of burs that are used in this area, too.
The aptly named diamond bur is popular in cosmetic dental care for shaping teeth, and the polishing bur is used to smooth over porcelain fittings, such as veneers, porcelain crowns, and porcelain fillings.
Burs For Specialist Dental Use
So, cosmetic and general aside, there are burs in dental care that are designed and used for more specialized treatments. If you are about to be fitted with a brace, your orthodontic team will use an endodontic bur to clean the teeth before attaching the brackets. They also use these to shape the teeth once the braces are removed.
Next, if you need a root canal, your dentist will use an endodontic bur. This is a bur with a longer head, which is designed to take the dentist from the crown of your tooth to the root, which will then be cleaned as part of the root canal.
