Veneer Redo: A Case with Severe Gum Inflammation

Hello, I'm Park Jonguk, director of Dream Dental Clinic.

A veneer is a treatment

built on the concept of tooth contouring, meant to make teeth beautiful.

Since it's a cosmetic treatment,

the result needs to look beautiful.

To make a tooth beautiful,

the ceramic used to fabricate a veneer

should ideally have sufficient thickness.

That means the tooth has to be reduced more to make room for it.

The side effects of veneers

mostly begin with excessive tooth reduction.

The less experienced a clinic is,

the more anxious it tends to be about the result,

which often leads to reducing the tooth more than necessary.

The minimum reduction needed to achieve the most beautiful possible result —

this is the most important part of a veneer.

This patient came to see me

when it had only been a few months

since her veneer treatment, with the gum inflammation already this severe.

She was a foreign model,

who had come to Korea specifically

for veneer treatment,

and honestly, even I thought this was a fairly serious problem when I saw it.

The reason inflammation like this appears after veneer treatment

is either poor oral hygiene,

or a problem with the design of the veneer itself.

When a veneer physiologically encroaches

into an area it shouldn't,

the body responds with this kind of inflammatory reaction.

At this point, the veneer redo first requires removing the existing restoration.

For a method that removes it effectively

while minimizing damage to the tooth, please see the link below.

The patient believed she'd had veneers,

but in fact only a few were actually veneers —

most of them were crowns.

The tooth reduction was also far too severe.

As a result, the inflammation was showing up severely too.

There's a principle for cases like this.

First, precise temporary teeth need to be made,

and worn for at least a month,

while confirming that

the gum inflammation clears up.

Once the inflammation has cleared,

a plan needs to be made for how to proceed with treatment.

Since the shape of the gum tends to change quite a lot during this process,

it's very difficult to set a plan right away.

The problem was that, as I mentioned earlier, this patient

was a foreign model,

so the veneer redo had to be finished within a week.

She had already received treatment once here in Korea,

and when this happened to her,

she came to me having lost a great deal of trust

in Korean healthcare —

I remember it being a genuinely difficult situation for me too.

With no other option,

we made the temporary teeth that same day.

Normally, after this kind of temporary tooth,

an even more precise set of temporary teeth should be made once more,

but due to the time constraint, we were only able to make one set.

When she came back a week later,

the gums still hadn't fully healed.

It was a genuinely disappointing situation.

We tried

bonding on the crowns and veneers made of ceramic.

I was worried

about whether the gum inflammation would heal well,

but I drew on nearly 20 years

of experience treating front teeth

as much as I could, and finished it in one session.

Honestly, a veneer redo with inflammation this severe

is a case that's

genuinely difficult to finish properly, even with plenty of time,

unless you've handled

a wide variety of cases before.

This is a photo taken

after she went back to her home country following the redo,

and returned to Korea again quite a while later.

It seems she hadn't been properly taught

how to brush,

so a bit of inflammation remained,

but compared with the first photo,

doesn't she look like a completely different person?

The gum inflammation had really cleared up a great deal.

After being taught proper brushing,

she went back to her home country again,

and came back to Korea two years later for other reasons.

We were able to confirm that the gum inflammation had completely cleared up.

Right down to the shape and color of the tooth,

it had been reborn into a beautiful, natural-looking tooth.

For gum inflammation to improve

this dramatically,

the already heavily reduced tooth needs to be

handled properly,

and the ceramic needs to be fabricated with real precision.

A veneer redo

really needs to be done at a clinic with a great deal of experience.

Since 2006, Dream Dental Clinic