What’s a Crown?
I imagine that a few folks out there don’t like spending a lot of time at the dental office. It’s just not a place you want to “hang out” at. There are drills, needles, scary masks, and so forth. I get it. Well, let’s just say, through a series of unfortunate events, you need to get a dental crown done. Great, what now? Well, let me go over with you the usual way a crown is made. It’s made through a multi-step process of anesthesia application and tooth preparation, tooth impression, lab coordination, and finally, delivery. Let’s say for instance that all went smooth at your first appointment, you got your tooth prepared, got the impression taken, and the dentist sent off the crown to the lab for creation. The lab will receive the impression, put the order into the system and in about a week and a half to two weeks later, you’ll have the crown back at the dental office ready to be delivered. It’s not the fastest procedure in the world, to be sure. I would also feel remiss in not mentioning this little tidbit as well: even after all of that work at the first appointment you had for this crown, there is no guarantee that it will be ready to place right away after it comes back from the lab. Multiple factors need to be just right to have that crown placed. The dental crown will need to be completely flush all the way around the tooth (no open spaces or margins at the base of the dental crown), the dentist will need to make sure that your “bite” is correct (when you bite down it should not feel awkward or uncomfortable), and he may need to adjust the crown on any given side to ensure a proper fit. As you can see, it’s no walk in the proverbial park.
Now that you know the “regular” way a crown is made, I shall divulge a little known (and FAR easier) way a dental crown can be made.
CEREC® Dental Crowns. Crowns made easy?
Dentistry has come a long way since the days of the ol’ bow and flint method of drilling teeth. Dentistry now uses lasers, intra-oral imaging, 3D x-rays, tooth colored fillings, and an array of others.
We now also have a method of making our crowns in office. That means, we no longer have to wait weeks for the lab to fabricate a crown for your tooth. In one appointment it is now possible to do the preparation,
digital impression, crown creation, and the placement of a crown. The crown itself is made with some of the strongest material in the industry and is also tooth-colored, for aesthetic purposes. The
process of taking the impression is very simple, and fast. The dentist simply uses a special camera to scan the teeth, the images get processed through the CEREC® 3D Imaging program and from that, a crown can be created that will fit the tooth wonderfully.
The benefits of this are pretty easy to see:
- You don’t have to take a lot of time off work to get this procedure done (one appointment).
- The impression is taken digitally, so no messy impression material need be used.
- If you have to go out of town, or the procedure is being done on an emergency basis, you won’t have to wait days or weeks to get the dental crown, or have a temporary crown which could break or come off while you’re on vacation or abroad.
- Over 7,000,000 restorations have been placed worldwide since CEREC® technology was introduced in 1987, and it still has success rates of more than 90%.
- Because of the ease and speed of which the crowns are created, root canal therapy and the crown can all be done in one day. You can essentially go from having infected tooth roots and a decayed tooth, to full restoration in a single day. That could not be said in dentistrty until fairly recently.
Technology. Making dentistry easier.
Dentistry is getting more and more technological breakthroughs, and with each one, the procedures are getting less and less complex and time consuming. To go from weeks to a single appointment is a pretty big breakthrough for full dental crown restoration, and is something you should definitely take advantage of.
I hope you learned something! Feel free to comment.
John Han on Google+.
