Dental Crowns Play an Important Role in Dental Care

Few things are as versatile as dental crowns. We use them in our Oakland dental office to solve a wide variety of challenges. They can be used to strengthen your teeth, protect them, and to improve their appearance. If you need a solution that works as hard as you do while offering you protection, this is it. In fact, thanks to crowns, there are very few challenges with your teeth that cannot be corrected.

Dental Crowns Protect Your Teeth

A crown is a cap that surrounds the portion of your tooth that is exposed. It can still be created in metal, but most of our patients prefer to have their crowns made of ceramic/porcelain for the front teeth or porcelain fused to metal for their back teeth. For our purposes, both solutions provide the protection a tooth needs after it has been damaged because nothing can directly touch the tooth once the crown is in place. This makes it ideal for teeth that have been cracked or chipped in an accident. This step is important because if the damaged area remains exposed, bacteria can set in, and the tooth can become infected which will lead to further discomfort and complications.

It can also benefit people who have suffered from enamel erosion. If the enamel has worn away from the tooth due to age, the food you have been eating, a lack of dental care, or even brushing too aggressively, your tooth will become sensitive. While your tooth will look fairly healthy, when you go to bite down on something or even take a drink of iced tea, you could experience severe discomfort due to sensitivity. The way to address this problem is to protect the teeth by using a dental crown. In all of these scenarios, the tooth will look healthy, natural, and beautiful once the crown has been placed.

Cosmetic Dentistry and Dental Crowns

Our Oakland dental office can also use crowns for cosmetic purposes. Since they are created to look like natural teeth and surround them entirely, we can use them to close gaps in between the teeth, cover dark stains, and change the overall shape or size of the teeth. For example, if your teeth appear too small for your frame, crowns can be created that will elongate them. If you have a funny gap in between your teeth that you want to be corrected, you can do so without the need for braces. If your teeth are dull, stained, and not responding to a whitening treatment as you would like - you can improve their appearance with dental crowns. There is virtually no issue that cannot be corrected with this solution.

Another way that we can use crowns is to secure a dental bridge in place. A bridge can be used to replace missing teeth. In this procedure, the missing tooth or teeth are attached to a gum-looking bridge. This bridge is secured by placing crowns on the two healthy surrounding teeth and using them as anchors. The result is a durable and semi-permanent tooth replacement. To learn more about this option or the other ways that crowns can improve your smile, call and schedule a consultation at 510-658-0110.