Repair Broken Teeth With Dental Crowns and Dental Bridges

Crowns we use when a tooth is either got too big of a filling … There’s a limit to how big fillings can be. When they’re too big, you can remove cavities with them, but they actually weaken the tooth. Think about when somebody’s splitting wood. What they do is they put a piece of wood and then they put a metal wedge and then they hammer that wedge and they split the wood. Well here, in this case, you’ve got the metal wedge is say maybe an old metal filling, you’ve got the wood which is your tooth and every time you bite down that’s the hammer. Over the years though, that metal wedge, or that big filling, put’s a lot of stress on the remaining tooth structure.

You have a weak tooth and one day you go and you bite on that Crackerjack, or chicken bone, and something breaks. What we do in those cases is we put crowns on the teeth. Just think of a crown as a helmet that goes over your teeth that’s made out of porcelain and looks natural. That way you’re able to bite down with confidence and be able to save your tooth. We usually don’t like to wait ’til a tooth is completely broken before we put a crown on it. If we see a problem, we try to point it out and protect a tooth before it breaks. Sometimes if a tooth breaks, we can’t save it and we have to take it out and do more invasive procedures.

Now, a bridge is an option when you’re missing teeth. With a bridge, you are using the teeth on each side of the tooth that you’re missing and you’re basically creating a fake tooth, we call it a pontic, that basically it gets attached to two teeth on each side of the space. The advantage to a bridge is that it’s a faster procedure as compared to say, implants. You’re able to sometimes correct for people to have a little more crooked teeth, you’d be able to make them look more straight. Most of the time an implant is something that I would prefer to do in missing teeth situations. We’ve been doing bridges traditionally for many years. Now in this day of implants, what I say is if you can keep a one tooth problem a one tooth problem, that’s always best.

With an implant, you don’t have to touch the adjacent teeth of the space. Some people are not ready for implants. Some people don’t have the bone to be able to put an implant in and they don’t want to go through the, what we call bone augmentation, to be able to get implants. In those cases, especially in the front of the mouth, sometimes doing a bridge is a better option for the patient. Those are all the things that we can talk about and I can guide you to help make a better decision and the best decision for your mouth.