Decayed or misshapen teeth can cause emotional distress, make it difficult to eat the foods you love, and prevent you from smiling or talking in front of others from fear of showing the imperfections in your mouth. If your smile could use some enhancing, both to preserve oral health and for a boost in your self-confidence, dental crowns are an ideal restorative solution.
In years past, crowns were a multi-step process in which you had to go without teeth or have temporary crowns, while your new crowns were being manufactured. Thanks today’s advanced technology, we offer CEREC® same-day crowns to our patients here at Dental Center of Hercules in Hercules, California, and the surrounding communities.
Dr. Lovely C. Manlapaz Teodoro and her outstanding team of cosmetic dentistry and dental implant dentists, help you get a more beautiful smile faster than ever. We don’t think you should have to wait for teeth or deal with temporary crowns. Here’s how CEREC technology delivers same-day crowns so you don’t have to worry about the appearance of your smile another day longer.
A crown is essentially a “cap” that fits over a decayed or weak tooth to protect its structural integrity. It’s important to preserve the tooth and its root for your overall oral health.
Perhaps you’ve had a lot of dental work done to a tooth, or it’s been compromised by decay or injury. Crowns allow us to protect your tooth by shielding it from further decay or injury, with a custom-fit ceramic or porcelain cap. We also use crowns as the visible tooth portion of dental implants, which give you strong replacement teeth.
Since a crown plays a critical role in the function and appearance of your tooth, it needs to fit in seamlessly with your existing teeth. This is why producing a good custom crown is so important. And that used to take time.
But today, CEREC makes custom-designed crowns possible in a single dental visit.
Before the advanced technology of CEREC came along, the traditional process of getting a crown required several visits to the dentist. You could potentially endure weeks of waiting for your new tooth while an outside dental lab manufactured your crown.
In the meantime, you’d wear a temporary crown. For many years, this multi-step process was frustrating for people who wanted to protect their teeth with a custom crown as quickly as possible.
First, you had to have impressions made of your tooth so they could be sent to a dental lab. These impressions made under the old system lacked accuracy and precision, so you ran the risk that your crown might not fit perfectly on the first attempt.
Once your crown was ready, the lab sent it back to your dentist so you could go in to have the temporary one removed and the new one placed. After all that waiting, the traditional process could be extremely frustrating, especially if your new crown didn’t look or fit perfectly at the first visit.
The CEREC (an acronym for ceramic reconstruction) system is leaps and bounds above the process for traditional crowns. With a CEREC crown, the first step involves making a digital scan of your tooth.
CEREC technology provides a level of precision and accuracy that you just can’t get with a putty-like mold. In fact, with digital technology, we can scan your tooth to within a tenth of a millimeter.
Once we have an accurate scan of the tooth that needs the crown, this information goes to our on-site CEREC milling station. Using a ceramic composite material, our milling unit custom manufactures your crown in just minutes, while you wait. So what was once a long drawn-out process, is now a single, simple in-office dental visit — no need for a temporary crown to protect your natural tooth.
When your crown is ready, Dr. Manlapaz Teodoro places it in your mouth and ensures that your bite is correct and that the crown closely matches the adjacent teeth in size, shape, and color. On the outside chance that your new crown isn’t quite right, we can digitally scan your tooth again and manufacture a new crown within minutes so you don’t have to come back for a second appointment at a later date.
With our meticulous attention to detail and our state-of-the-art CEREC system, Dr. Manlapaz Teodoro and the team make sure you leave our practice with a crown that fulfills both your functional and aesthetic objectives, without all the frustration of having to wait for a new tooth.
Do CEREC crowns sound like the solution you’ve been hoping for? Call today to learn more or schedule a consultation, or book an appointment through the online system.
