CEREC ‘Same Day Crowns’ have been available at Framingham Family Dental Care for over a year. While this technology has been in development for at least 20 years, I was attracted to this ‘new’ technique by the vast improvements CEREC has made recently to their product, particularly in the wide range of new materials that the CEREC system has available to create beautiful, strong, and natural looking dental restorations.
So, why choose CEREC over traditional crowns? In the past, crowns were either made from porcelain baked onto metal or were made entirely of metal. To understand the benefits of CEREC, we need to know a little about these older crown techniques. Dentists have long talked about the ‘Gold Standard’. For centuries gold restorations were universally acknowledged to be the best for strength and longevity. The gold was cast in one piece so it never broke and was mixed with other metals to have the same attrition (wear) rate as natural tooth structure. However, while a few cultural groups have linked gold with wealth, most affluent societies wanted white, natural looking teeth. Hence, in the past fifty years or so, dentists started using all porcelain or porcelain over metal for crowns. Unfortunately, all porcelain usually proved to be too fragile, and porcelain over metal often creates an unappealing black line at the base of the crown.
Enter CEREC and the materials it uses. CEREC uses pre-manufactured blocks of ceramic that are formulated for durability and wear so they are as strong as metal and look and feel like your own teeth. And the CEREC technique has the ability to color-match the ceramic to create the most attractive and natural looking teeth imaginable.
CEREC crowns and restorations provide a huge improvement over previous techniques! But that is not all! I will get into “Why CEREC?” more in the next blog. Stay tuned!