Elmora Dental Associates

A custom sports mouthguard takes one impression and a short second visit, and it costs a small fraction of what rebuilding a fractured front tooth does. Elmora Dental Associates, on Elmora Avenue in Elizabeth, makes them, which says something about how the practice is arranged: the cheap preventive jobs people skip are handled at the same address as the expensive reconstructive ones that follow when they are skipped. Fillings, extractions, bridges, wisdom teeth, children's cleanings, braces and clear aligners all sit inside the same building.

Dr. Sonal Deshpande, who trained at NYU School of Dentistry, built the practice to keep implants, cosmetic work, orthodontics and children's dentistry at one address instead of parcelling a family out to three specialists in three towns. Dr. Marwah works alongside her with a focus on implant restoration and root canal treatment, so a tooth that needs saving and the crown that goes over it afterwards are handled by the same pair of clinicians.

Aligner treatment is the largest single part of what the office does, and it is worth understanding the mechanism before committing a year to it. A digital scan of your teeth becomes a three-dimensional model, and the route from where each tooth currently sits to where it should end up is planned on screen as a long series of very small movements. That plan is then manufactured as a set of clear trays, each shaped slightly differently from the one before. You wear a tray for about a week, roughly twenty-two hours a day, taking it out only to eat and clean your teeth. Small tooth-coloured attachments are usually bonded to certain teeth first, giving the plastic something to grip and push against, and they come off at the end. The unglamorous truth about aligners is that results track wear time almost exactly. A tray sitting in a pocket does nothing.

Same-day emergency appointments are offered where the schedule allows, which is the difference between a Tuesday toothache dealt with properly and a weekend spent in a hospital emergency room being handed antibiotics and told to see a dentist. Weekday hours run into the evening at the start of the week and Saturday appointments continue into mid-afternoon. The address is 74-76 Elmora Avenue, mid-block on a busy shopping strip with buses running its length, so arriving without a car is easy and parking one is not. Insurance participation and payment terms are worth confirming when you book, since plan networks change from one year to the next.