How Many Dental Visits Are Needed to Get a Dental Crown?

You are looking at two visits to get a well done, aesthetic, durable, lab fabricated dental crown. The first visit will be to prepare the tooth for the crown, take an impression of the tooth to send to the lab, and fabricate you an aesthetic temporary crown. This vist is approximately one hour. the second visit will be to remove tetemporary, disinfect the tooth, then bond the crown to your tooth.

A dental crown covers all five exposed surfaces of a tooth.  The crown must fit well to chew for proper digestion, comfort, and harmony with the other teeth, gums, bone and muscle.  First the tooth must be prepared or reduced in size to allow for thickness of the crown and remove all diseased tooth structure.  Then the exact dimensions must be captured,  Currently there are two methods to accomplish this capturing.  The oldest, most widely utilized technique involves taking an impression utilzing a material that closely adapts to the prepared tooth in the mouth.   The second method involves optically scanning the tooth. Both of these dental techniques typically occur in the first appointment.   The crown is then fabricated using this impression whether physical or virtual.   This can happen anytime after the impression and can take from minutes to weeks.  Some dental practices prepare and seat crowns the same day by having a lab on premises or having a milling machine on premises,

Very few dental practices produce crowns the same day.   The majority of dentists have commercial laboratories produce the crowns offsite.   A second visit is needed to seat the crown.  The first visit for a crown is usually concluded with the fabrication of a temporary crown.   Then the patient returns once the real crown is received from the lab to seat the real crown.   Thus typicallly a crown takes two visits.

In the past it took a minimum of two visits to complete a crown procedure.  The first visit was to prepare the tooth, take an impression for the dental lab and make a temporary crown.  The follow up visit was then to place the crown and make any bite corrections.  Today some offices are able to offer their patients one visit crowns using CEREC technology (CAD-CAM), where the crown is made and placed the same day.

1. Numb, drill, temporize and impress the tooth. 2. Last visit: cement crown, adjust bite if needed. 

The number of visits needed to have a crown made for a tooth depends upon the type of restoration that will be fabricated.  Traditionally, a crown required a minimum of two visits to the dentist.  On the first visit, the tooth would be prepared, an impression of the prepared tooth would be made and sent to a laboratory so that the permanent crown could be fabricated, and a provisional or temporary crown would be placed on the tooth.  Depending on the lab's turn-around time, the patient would wear the temporary crown for 1 to 3 weeks.  On the second visit, the temporary crown would be removed and the permanent crown would be placed onto the prepared tooth.

Many dentists, myself included, have the ability to fabricate all-ceramic crowns in one visit.  Often, I can accomplish this procedure in a little over an hour.  Utilizing computerized scanners and CAD-CAM technology (CEREC), we can create beautiful crowns with unsurpassed precision--all in one visit.

So, the number of visits depends upon the type of crown.