Everyone wants to have a nice smile. Especially in a world obsessed with selfies, when your picture will be plastered all over the Internet, you don’t want others to see any stains, cracks, or gaps wrecking your smile. Your smile conveys a lot of information about you and is one of your biggest assets so you want to do everything you can to make it sparkle and avoid things that can hurt it. Along with smoking, drinking a lot of coffee or tea, chewing ice, and grinding your teeth, poor dental hygiene is a major contributing factor to ruining your smile. Unfortunately, even if you follow good dental hygiene, as you get older, normal wear and tear will take its toll on your teeth.The majority of people who get crowns are middle-aged. Dental crowns can help bring back your beautiful smile.
What is a Crown and Why Might You Need One
A dental crown is a cap shaped like a tooth that is used as a cover to your tooth to restore its size and shape, strength, and improve its appearance. A crown can also:
- Attach bridges
- Help strengthen a tooth that has a large filling that doesn’t have enough tooth remaining to hold the filling
- Cover up stains
- Protect a weak tooth from breaking
- Restore a broken tooth
- Protect against further decay
- Improve the general appearance of your mouth and give you back your smile
How do I know if I Need a Crown?
What do you do if you are at the dentist and he tells you that you have a very large cavity that needs a large filling or you can get a crown? How do you decide which is best for you? First of all, if you trust your dentist, which you should, talk to them and get their professional input. The general rule of thumb is when damage such as breakage or decay that involves more than one-third of the tooth, a filling is not the best solution.
You also need to know that the cost of a crown is more than that of a filling. In addition, getting a crown generally requires more than one visit, unless you find a dentist that offers same-day crowns like Stanton Smiles in Miami, FL.
A very important factor to consider is the level of protection each option offers. A crown covers and encases the tooth it’s placed on. It also strengthens and reinforces a tooth because it is literally a splint that holds a tooth together. Crowns are made of strong materials like metal, porcelain, ceramic, or stainless steel. Whereas dental fillings that are embedded within the tooth don’t provide much protection and don’t increase the overall strength of the tooth. Additionally, if the filling takes up too much of the tooth, it can actually increase the chances of breakage.
Dental Crown Procedure
There are dentists who require multiple visits, usually 2, to complete the crown process and those who have the proper equipment to complete the process in a single visit. The general procedures are:
- Preparation and Shaping: The first thing your dentist will do is take x-rays to check the tooth roots and the surrounding bone. If the decay is extensive or if there is a risk of injury or infection to the tooth, the dentist might need to perform a root canal. The dentist will usually administer local anaesthesia and reduce the size of the tooth to allow room for the crown to be placed. In addition to reducing the overall size of the tooth, the dentist might also trim it to a tapered form so that the crown can be slipped over it.
- Taking an Impression: After your tooth is shaped in preparation for a crown, your dentist will need to make a copy of it in order to make the crown in the correct size to fit over the shaped tooth.
- Crown Placement: If your dentist uses a 2-visit process, a temporary crown will be used until the permanent crown is fabricated in a lab and sent back to the dentist. There is usually a two week time between the two visits. If you choose a dentist that provides same-day crown services after the tooth is prepped, a digital scan is taken of the tooth and the crown is ready for placement in 10-15 minutes.
If you want to restore and improve the look of your smile, you should definitely consider a crown. The crown will blend in naturally with your surrounding teeth, strengthen the tooth the crown is covering, cover a discoloured or damaged tooth, and give you back the smile you always wanted.
