My daughter had an accident which caused one of her teeth to gray. The dentist said there was nothing to worry about and it will fall out soon enough. I wanted to get it whitened, but he said that was absurd, and lectured me about making appearances so important to my daughter. Is it really impossible to whiten that tooth?
Alison J. – Little Rock, AR
Alison,
It sounds like your dentist doesn’t have the best bedside (or chairside) manner. It was rude for him to treat you that way, regardless of the viability of the treatment.
Unfortunately, even though he went about it the wrong way, your dentist was correct about the treatment. First, teeth whitening would be done on a complete arch, not a single tooth.
In this case, however, even if you wanted to do the entire arch it wouldn’t matter. The graying is from trauma, not staining, which means the whitening procedure would be ineffective. In fact, it’s more likely to whiten all the teeth but the gray one, making it more obvious.
If kids at school are teasing her, help her to be armed with a comeback. One of my friends has a child with a crazy cowlick that is so bad, that can’t get it to stay even with goopy gel. Instead of stressing about it, they took a different approach. Her son named the cowlick and made a joke out of it. Now all the kids have fun with it and greet both Steve and his cowlick sidekick. Some of them even wish they had one.
The key is, if she’s confident, the kids will back off.
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