Over the holidays, you may have heard your uncle who was visiting from Poughkeepsie talking about his “caps” on his teeth. He may even have volunteered to show you his gold teeth.
Today, we would call those porcelain crowns, and they’d be indistinguishable from your adjacent uncrowned teeth because they’d be made of porcelain, not gold. And if you were a patient of Implant Dentistry of Florida, you could have a crown like that made in a single visit to our Melbourne office, thanks to our CEREC® 3D design and milling system.
Drs. Brown, Martinez, and Robbins use CEREC® crowns to return strength to a tooth that, due to extensive decay, a deep crack, or other serious problem, would otherwise need to be extracted. The crown allows the patient to keep the natural tooth.
What is a CEREC crown?
You can read more detail about porcelain crowns in general on this page of our website, but here’s a little more about the CEREC® system and the crowns it makes.
CEREC® stands for Chairside Economical Restoration of Esthetic Ceramics. The system was developed to enable practices to design and create porcelain crowns right in the office, without the delay and extra appointment needed by having a dental lab fabricate the practice’s crowns.
How is a CEREC crown produced?
At Implant Dentistry of Florida, the tooth is prepared for the crown in the same way. It is shaved down on all sides and on the top. Various measurements and images are then taken of the tooth. In other practices, impressions would also be made. This would be sent to the lab to make the crown. Instead, we only need the data (no goopy impressions required!), which we then send directly to the CEREC® 3D system. The system software allows us to create a three-dimensional design of the patient’s crown right in the office. Once his design is finished, we can share it with the patient for final approval.
Once the design is finalized, the design parameters are sent to the CEREC® milling station. The milling station takes a small block of solid dental porcelain and mills it to the precise specs of the design. This milling usually takes around 30 minutes.
When the custom CEREC® crown is finished, we check the color match with your adjacent teeth. We then place the crown on your tooth temporarily so you can test the fit. Once satisfied with the fit, the new CEREC crown is cemented onto your tooth and your once-endangered tooth now sports a sparkling new porcelain crown and is ready for biting and chewing. This is all done in a single appointment!
Our patients from Melbourne and the surrounding areas love the convenience of our CEREC system. So will you! If you want to make an appointment with us, call (321) 372-7700.