CEREC Same-day Dental Restorations
Dentist in Burlington
You hear you need a dental crown — what’s your next thought? If it’s figuring out how you’ll make time to get your smile back to its good health, we’ve got good news for you. Dr. Mary Makhlouf can plan, prepare for, and place your dental crown, all in one visit! Things just got a lot easier with CEREC same-day crowns.
Why Dental Crowns Are Necessary
Before we get into CEREC, let’s discuss why you need a dental crown in the first place. These thin, tooth-shaped coverings restore the strength and enhance the appearance of damaged, decayed, weak, or worn teeth.
Some of the reasons you may need a dental crown include:
- Restoring a decayed tooth when there is not enough room for a filling
- Holding together a broken tooth
- Strengthening a weak or worn tooth
- As the final step in a root canal
- Restoring a dental implant
Crowns have a wide range of applications. They can be made out of porcelain/ceramic, porcelain-fused-to-metal, zirconia, gold, or metal alloys. Same-day CEREC dental crowns are constructed from a single block of ceramic, a material that looks, functions, and feels just like your natural tooth enamel.
How CEREC Compares to Traditional Crowns
Traditionally, the process for a dental crown takes two visits to the dentist with a week or more of waiting in between. During the interim, a temporary crown is worn to cover the prepared tooth. Unfortunately, this temporary restoration is prone to breaking and requiring additional visits to the dentist. And because it is not customized to match the surrounding tooth enamel, a temporary crown may be visible in the smile.
CEREC, or chairside economical restoration of esthetic ceramics, eliminates the need for the second appointment and temporary crown. With CAD/CAM technology and an in-house milling machine, your dentist can prepare for, sketch, manufacture, and place your natural-looking dental crown in just one visit to our office.
The CEREC Process
In total, a same-day crown appointment lasts about an hour and a half to two hours. First, your dentist will remove any decay and prepare the tooth for its crown. Tooth preparation requires removing and reshaping the enamel to make room for the crown to fit securely on top. Once the tooth has been prepared, digital images are captured of it and the surrounding oral structures.
Digital imagery is more comfortable for you, as it creates a three-dimensional model of your mouth without the need for messy, uncomfortable impressions. It also provides a highly-accurate image of the oral structures, improving your doctor’s treatment planning for a crown that fits and feels just like it should.
Once your doctor has collected all the necessary information, she feeds it into the CEREC software and sketches a detailed image of the crown. This plan is sent to the in-house milling machine, which manufactures your crown in a little under half an hour. The result? A beautiful, natural-looking crown — and a healthy, radiant smile that’s back to its old self.
