A Beautiful Smile! That’s our goal.
Having a great smile certainly includes keeping all your teeth. When you crack your tooth or a part of your tooth you might worry that the tooth will be lost. Yet most teeth can be rebuilt and reinforced. Dental crowns are the way we “save” your tooth.
How do you know if you need a crown?
A good general rule is that when a chunk has broken off, your tooth needs to be rebuilt with solid materials constructed in a lab.
What makes crowns better than fillings?
Crowns take over when greater strength is needed – when too much of the natural tooth structure has been lost. The materials are stronger.
How do crowns stay on the tooth?
Simply put, we cement them in place. Old cements have been replaced by bonding cements that chemically bond both to your tooth and to the crown. It’s really unlikely that normal wear and tear can dislodge the bonded cement …yet if it happens we would simply remove the existing cement from the crown and re-cement it.
How long will they last?
We have patients who have had their original crowns for forty years and more. And when you are coming in for regular hygiene appointments and wearing night appliances where needed … it’s rare for a crown to dislodge.
What is the procedure? What’s happening to the tooth?
The most direct explanation is that we remove a thin layer of the existing tooth structure and replace it (and the broken or cracked part) with a layer of reinforced porcelain that looks and feels like your normal tooth. That layer of porcelain is custom designed to fit your tooth exactly.
In the office:
We have two appointments – the first is to prepare the tooth and the second is to cement the crown. Both of these appointments take place at our Tewksbury location where we serve clients from the greater Boston communities of Andover, Billerica, Chelmsford, Lowell and Wilmington, Massachusetts. We use a top-notch lab for fabrication.
What are the different choices for materials?
Anytime we can make a crown from the most beautiful materials available we will do it. Those are called “all ceramic” reinforced crowns and we use them about 85% of the time. Some people put so much pressure on the back teeth that we are forced to use porcelain fused to metal crowns – where you see the porcelain and know there is metal underneath. And in a few cases where someone might be putting extreme force on a tooth we resort to the strongest material … gold.
