The crown is used to cover a tooth that’s been damaged or malformed, whatever it may be. Let’s say a typical case one has large fillings, and eventually, you can’t have the tooth refilled so you have to put a crown on top. Or the tooth has had a root canal. You want to restore the tooth, you have to put a crown on top. And the crown is very cosmetic. We make them today that they’re just . . . they’re hard to distinguish between the natural teeth. Many times, they’re looking better that the natural teeth.
So you put the patient back into, here again, normal form and function. And basically, I trim the tooth down to make a stump. Patients describe it as a stump. Take an impression, here again, the laboratory fabricates the crown. And we cement the crown. Whether it be a porcelain fused to metal, whether it be an all-ceramic crown, a zirconia crown, but they look great, look fantastic.
A bridge is a treatment where a patient may be missing certain teeth, and they may not opt for a dental implant either due to time, or due to expense, or due to sometimes a bridge is just a better treatment. So a bridge is like many, many teeth connected together and the teeth that we called abutments, these are the ones the bridge actually anchors to, are prepared as they would be for a crown. So it’s like a crown adjacent to false teeth, so to speak, but they’re porcelain fused to metal or all-ceramic again. And they fit right over the teeth. They’re cemented on and it’s the same procedure as a crown, basically, but there are just more teeth to work with. Generally speaking, the patients are very pleased with the crowns and bridges that we perform in this practice.