Dental Crown

I would say that crowns are probably the most common dental procedure, other than fillings, that we perform in our office, and they're actually an extremely important way to preserve teeth. Crowns are done by reducing the size of a tooth. What a crown does is that it covers the tooth and protect it. We call them full coverage restorations because we fully cover the entire tooth. The nice thing is, these days, they are beautiful. They're made out of solid porcelain with no metal restorations in them. The statistics say we're supposed to quote plus or minus 20 years, but of course, I've seen crowns last much, much, much longer. There are a lot of misconceptions about the word "bridges" in dentistry. There are some people who consider bridges to be a removable prosthesis, one where you use a bridge to replace missing teeth but it's removable. However, the most common usage today of the term "bridge" is a fixed bridge. It is when you're replacing a missing tooth, you use actually three crowns that are hooked together. You have a missing tooth, and you have a tooth in front of the space and behind the space, and you crown those teeth and have a dummy tooth in the middle. And just like a crown, it's cemented permanently in place and functions like your normal teeth. Today, we have new technology to use a scanner where we basically take photos of the tooth, instead of the impression that we used to take, and we send that to the lab. And these crowns and bridges are then fabricated in the lab, sent back to us, and then placed and cemented permanently into your mouth.