At Sunrise Dental, we are always looking for new ways we can improve the service that we provide to our patients.
We do this through continuing education so we are able to implement the newest techniques in our offices.
We also do this through technology. The most recent example of this is the addition of a CEREC machine to our Raleigh office. Because of its central location, this will help patients who visit our dentists in Durham, Chapel Hill, and Cary, too.
Keep reading to find out what kind of a difference CEREC dental crowns could make for you or someone you care about.
What CEREC Is
CEREC stands for “ceramic restoration.” The CEREC system allows us to create dental crowns in our office using small blocks of ceramic materials.
This is the same material that dental laboratories use to create dental crowns. The difference is having a CEREC machine in our Raleigh office means we can create those crown ourselves.
This means all our patients will be able to get their dental crowns faster now than they could before.
The Dental Crown Procedure
The best way to explain how the CEREC crown procedure is different than the previous process is to go through it step-by-step.
If you come to our Raleigh office today with a chipped or broken tooth, we will examine your tooth to make sure a dental crown is what you need. (If the break is deep, you may want to consider a root canal treatment as well, but that’s a discussion for another time).
The first step is making a digital scan of your teeth. This will help us design a dental crown that matches the size and appearance of your neighboring teeth. That information will be fed into the CEREC machine through computer software.
In the meantime, we will reshape your tooth. This involves removing the parts of your tooth that were damaged to form an abutment.
The milling machine can create your dental crown while you wait. Once it’s ready, we can bond it to the abutment on your tooth.
You can walk in with a broken tooth and leave with a permanent replacement.
If you visit our offices in Cary, Chapel Hill, or Durham, we may not be able to get the crown placed right away, but we can get it to you much faster since we have our own machine and the Raleigh office.
Before we had our own in-office milling machine, we had to order your dental crown from a laboratory. Depending on how many orders they received, it could be weeks before your permanent crown was created and shipped back to us.
While you wait, you would wear a temporary crown on your tooth, but you can trust us when we say that permanent crowns are much better.
Uses For CEREC Crowns
CEREC dental crowns can be used for a range of restorative services.
This includes fixing:
- Broken teeth
- Chipped teeth
- Decayed teeth
- Discolored teeth
- Infected teeth
- Misshapen teeth
- Worn down teeth
Dental crowns also can be used to replace dental fillings. If you have a filling, you will lose a little of your tooth each time it is replaced, and no filling lasts forever.
A dental crown can solve that issue in a more permanent way.
Dental crowns also can be combined with dental implants to replace missing or lost teeth. We hope you never need this, but if you should lose a tooth for any reason, this duo is the closest thing to a replacement tooth that modern dentistry has to offer.
The implant replaces the root of your lost tooth, while the dental crown replaces the missing crown.
Visually, it will look like the rest of your teeth. Functionally, it will allow you to bite and chew just like you could with your real teeth.
Maintaining your dental crown is no different than caring for your natural teeth. You should brush it twice a day along with the rest of your teeth, and you should floss between your crown and its neighbors to reduce your risk of gum disease.
A Step In The Right Direction
We said it before and we will say it again. We do what we do at Sunrise Dental because our patients deserve the best care that our dentists can offer.
Having a CEREC machine at our Raleigh office will benefit our patients in Cary, Chapel Hill, and Durham as well. If you would like to know more about CEREC or about dental crowns, call the office closest to you or use our online appointment form to schedule a visit.