A dental crown is like a cap for a tooth that has been damaged, restoring its appearance and function. A tooth might become seriously chipped or fractured due to an accident and a crown can cover and hold the tooth together. Or one or more teeth might have been lost in an accident or due to poor dental hygiene, which results in an infection that pulls the supporting gums away from teeth. Or you may have been grinding your teeth while you sleep (which you might only know about if a partner complains).
There are other dental situations that would also call for a crown as the solution:
- Stained teeth that do not respond to whitening and need a material to cover them which does not easily discolor.
- Cavities that are so large they can’t be simply replaced with fillings.
- A tooth that has had a root canal procedure and needs a crown to restore its chewing strength and appearance.
- Misshapen teeth that you would like to improve with more attractive crowns.
- A gap due to a missing tooth, which needs to have a crown in its place that looks like the original tooth and is bonded to the neighboring teeth with a dental bridge.
- The need for a tooth-like crown to be the visible part of a dental implant, which is anchored into the socket from which a tooth was extracted.
With most practices, it always takes at least two visits to place the crown. But if the issue is simple, such as the need to place a crown over a cavity or a tooth that has been ground down, this can be done in a single visit because CITIDental Tremont utilizes an in-office CEREC machine (which stands for Chairside Economical Restoration of Esthetic Crowns) to produce it in a couple of hours while you wait.
CEREC Makes the Process Easier
We use a special camera to create a 3D image of the area receiving the crown and then provide the information to our CAD-CAM machine (computer-aided design and manufacturing), which creates this out of dental porcelain.
At other practices, you would need to have a physical impression taken and come back a couple of weeks later after a dental laboratory has crafted the crown. That means taking the additional time for the second visit, perhaps needing to arrange childcare or take off from work. Meantime, you would be wearing a temporary version of the crown, which would not be as comfortable or effective as the crown we can provide you at the end of one visit.