Martin Williams, DDS. Blog

What to expect when getting CEREC?

A friendly, healthy smile goes a long way to making an excellent first impression, but if you have decayed or damaged teeth, you might be used to hiding your smile. Crowns, or caps that cover tooth damage, can restore your smile and provide you with a confidence boost. Thanks to leading-edge technology, you can get that confidence boost faster than ever with CEREC crowns.

Short for Chairside Economical Restoration of Esthetic Ceramics, CEREC technology allows dentists to develop, produce, and place your crowns at a single appointment. This means that you can see your smile go from frightening to flawless in a single day. Because the CEREC procedure is significantly faster and more convenient than the process of having crowns made in an offsite lab, many dentists and patients have begun turning to this new technology to restore smiles.

CEREC vs. Traditional Crown Process

The CEREC process is simple and quick, taking about two to three hours from start to finish. This includes the time it takes to prepare the tooth for the CEREC crown, create the crown itself, and bond it. On the other hand, the traditional crown placement process takes about two weeks and at least two dental visits. With a traditional crown, your dentist will prep the tooth for a new crown, then take molds of the tooth or teeth that need crowns and send the data to a lab, which will create a crown specifically designed to fit in your mouth. This can take several weeks. In the meantime, you will wear a temporary crown. Finally, your dentist will schedule another appointment, during which he or she will use a dental bonding agent to place your crown. If all goes as planned, it will fit and no adjustments will need to be made in which case the crown would have to be sent back to the lab.

How Does CEREC Work?

With CEREC, your dentist will use in-house, cutting-edge technology instead of an offsite lab to design and implement your tooth during a single office visit. Using an intraoral camera, design software, and a milling machine, your dentist will examine your teeth, input data into the software program, design a crown using that software program, and send it to the milling machine for grinding that same day. The entire milling process can take as little as six minutes.

What are the Advantages of CEREC?

With CEREC, your dentist can identify the need for a crown, prepare the tooth for a crown, make the crown and cement the crown in one sitting. Any adjustments to the crown that need to be made can also be done during that one dental appointment. Patients don’t have to come back later to complete the crown process. Patients don’t have to take two or more days out of their busy schedules to get a crown. Patients can even watch their crown being milled right before their eyes!

When you need a dental crown, it’s important not to ignore it and at Sierra Dental Care of Green Bay, we make the entire crown dental experience, a quick, comfortable, and effective one! Call us today!