A practice with three dentists on staff tends to hold onto families for decades, and Great Smiles on North Broad Street is built that way. Dr. Elvira Dela Torre, Dr. Michelle Sabater Weddle and Dr. Wilma Rho cover between them the full arc of general practice: a child's first fluoride visit, a teenager's braces or Invisalign, the fillings and root canals of middle age, and the crowns, bridges, dentures or implants that come later. Two things here sit slightly outside the standard general-dentistry menu, namely treatment for TMJ pain and for sleep apnea, which is how a jaw that clicks and aches, or a partner's steady complaint about snoring, eventually becomes a dental appointment rather than a shrug.
Gum treatment is the least visible work in the building and the most consequential, since periodontal disease is the leading reason adults lose teeth that are otherwise perfectly sound. It begins with measurement. A fine probe is walked around each tooth and the depth of the pocket between gum and root is recorded in millimeters. Three is healthy. Five and above means bacteria are living somewhere a toothbrush cannot follow them. The response is scaling and root planing: the area is numbed, hardened deposits are lifted off the buried section of root, and that surface is planed smooth so soft tissue can reattach to it. It is normally done one section of the mouth at a time rather than all at once. Pockets are re-measured a few weeks later to see what has responded, and maintenance cleanings afterward run every three or four months instead of every six, because that is the pace at which the bacteria repopulate.
The office makes a point of seating patients close to their scheduled time, which sounds like a small courtesy until you have lost an afternoon to a waiting room. Cards, checks and cash are all taken at the desk. North Broad Street runs up the spine of Elizabeth toward Hillside, so the address is reachable from Elmora and the north end without fighting through downtown, and the group keeps a second office in Watchung for patients who move west. Saturday appointments run to early afternoon.
