Dental crowns are one of the most versatile tools in our dentist’s toolkit. A dental crown can support, protect, and restore the function of a tooth damaged or weakened by cavities or root canal treatment. A dental crown can cover a discoloured or misshapen tooth. Crowns can even provide the support needed to replace missing teeth using a dental bridge.
What are Dental Crowns?
Dental crowns are hollow caps that slip over the top of a tooth prepared to receive it without adding excessive height, width, weight, and bulk. The crown is designed to fit snugly over the underlying prepared tooth to restore that tooth’s shape, appearance, size, shape, and structural integrity. Crowns come in many different varieties. A traditional crown covers the entire underlying tooth. On the other hand, onlays, inlays and three-quarter crowns cover only portions of the tooth.
Crowns can be made of various materials, including metal (gold, chromium, nickel, and palladium); porcelain fused to metal; resin; ceramic and porcelain; and pressed ceramic. Traditionally, crowns have taken at least two medical appointments to be prepared and fit into a patient’s mouth. That’s in addition to appointments the patient may have attended for the root canal, fillings, or other dental work relating to the tooth being treated. That requirement for at least two appointments has traditionally been one of the downsides of this highly effective restorative and cosmetic dentistry tool.
Introducing Same-Day Dental Crowns!
Dental innovations and technological advances never seem to cease. Thanks to the development of the CEREC system, you can now be fitted with dental crowns in West Edmonton in just one appointment, including Westside Family Dental. At Westside, we know that your time is valuable and that scheduling multiple appointments to be fit with a dental crown can be challenging and frustrating. Dentists can eliminate those frustrations by significantly investing time, money, and training and providing this highly versatile and effective dental solution in just one visit.
What is CEREC?
CEREC stands for Chairside Economical Restoration of Esthetic Ceramics. Using the CEREC system, the staff at our dental clinic near you will use computer-aided design (CAD) technology to take a series of digital images of your prepared tooth.
In the dusty days of dental yore, images and moulds would have been sent to technicians at an external laboratory to prepare a crown. With CEREC today, those images are instantly transmitted to a milling machine in our dentist’s office. Using those detailed dental images, that milling machine will prepare a crown out of a block of ceramic material while you wait in the waiting room.
Once the crown has been milled, our dentist and their staff will dry-fit it over your prepared tooth to ensure that it fits snugly and precisely alongside your other teeth to achieve all your goals. Once the fit and suitability of the crown have been confirmed — including its height, size, shape, colour, bite, and fit — our dentist will cement the crown to your underlying tooth. Although a crown depends on the health of the underlying tooth, you can expect it to last as long as the tooth it covers. With good daily dental hygiene, you’ll have that crown for the rest of your life.
For many people, the convenience of obtaining same-day CEREC dental crowns near you far outweighs the higher cost of same-day crowns compared to traditional ones. That higher cost reflects the significant investments made by our dentist to obtain the necessary technology, equipment, and materials and to train their staff to provide crowns while you wait.
If you’re curious about obtaining dental crowns near you for any of the reasons discussed here, contact our dental clinic near you to ask if they can offer CEREC same-day crowns. Our dentist and staff can solve a wide range of dental needs with a custom-prepared ceramic crown in just a single appointment.