THE 5 STEPS TO SAME DAY CROWNS

Once you and Dr. Sabharwal have decided that a dental crown is needed to protect your teeth or improve your smile, what steps are going to be involved in creating and placing that crown? There are five steps to this process:

1. Preparing : First, your tooth must be prepared to receive the crown. For a crown to fit into the existing space, your tooth must be slimmed down. Dr. Sabharwal will gently file down both the height and the width of your tooth.
2. Measuring : As soon as it is prepared, digital impressions will be made. An intraoral camera—one designed to fit into your mouth and take accurate images of your teeth—will be used to record the exact shape of the tooth to be crowned. This imaging system is a welcome improvement over the old-fashioned system of inserting impression trays filled with gummy material into a patient’s mouth. Some people couldn’t resist gagging with the old system.
3. Designing : These digital measurements are electronically sent to our CEREC device, a computer-aided hardware and software system in our office for designing and creating crowns. Dr. Sabharwal will utilize the CEREC software to design your new crown and then tell the system to start creating it. The CEREC mill in our office will begin to carve the crown out of durable, porcelain material that has been selected as a match to the color of your tooth.
4. Adjusting : Because of the accuracy of this computer-aided system, the color and fit of a CEREC crown are normally superior to the quality of a lab-created crown. This means that very few adjustments to the fit of your new crown will be needed when it is tried on. Some slight adjustments of tinting may be made to ensure your new crown resembles adjacent teeth as closely as possible. You’ll have the chance to review the look and fit when it is fastened on with a temporary cement.
5. Bonding : When everyone is happy with the fit and appearance, the crown will be permanently cemented to the tooth. The entire process usually takes just a couple of hours. That’s a huge improvement over the older system which required us to place a temporary crown while a lab filled our order for your crown. You’d have to come back
   a couple of weeks after your initial visit to complete the process. CEREC crowns are fast, beautiful and durable, making them an ideal solution to the inconvenience and
   imprecision of old-fashioned crowns.