Why Should I Chose CEREC Crowns Over Other Types of Crowns?

The only advantage to a Cerec crown is that you will receive your final crown in one visit.  I feel like the lab fabricated crowns are much stronger and more aesthetic than Cerec restorations, especially if you are talking about a front tooth.  Hope this helps. 

In the skilled hands any procedure should work fine. Advantage of CEREC crowns is cementation and delivery of the crown can be done fast. Disadvantage is aestetic may not be a good as if done by an experienced dental technician, who makes them day in and day out. Dentists are not trained as much in actual fabrication of the restorations. Also CEREC crowns on average require bigger reduction of the tooth to be successful and long lasting.

CAD/CAM, or computer dentistry is the way of the future and with CEREC Crowns, you can have the entire procedure completed in a single dental visit. CEREC Crowns are accurate and precise, and best of all convenient.



Conventional crowns require at least two dental visits, messy dental impressions and a temporary dental crown. With CEREC, your dentist can custom design a new dental crown that was uploaded to the computer before custom designing it to match the tooth shade and the rest of your teeth.







CEREC Crowns also look more natural as there is no metal used.







If you do decide on CEREC Crowns, make sure that you find a dentist who has the training and the experience. Good luck!

CEREC crowns use CAD/CAM technology which is the future of dentistry.  This technology is also being used by the dental labs to fabricate crowns.  It is very accurate and convenient for the patient.  Your tooth is scanned and then read by the computer for fabrication.  With a conventional method of making a crown, a dental impression is made of the tooth.  First of all, the impression needs to be done properly to get a good imprint of the tooth and impression material is very sensitive to temperature and time.  Then it is sent to a dental lab where it is poured up by a lab worker.  Once again, the pour up accuracy is determined by method, temperature, and time of pour.  So without getting too detailed, you can see already how more accurate a scanned impression would be of your tooth and the accuracy is going to affect the fit of the crown.  When the crown is being designed on the computer, the dentist can make many changes.  In my opinion, the dentist who just prepared your tooth has an advantage of being able to do the best read of the margins and do a custom design of the new crown.  Even the determination of tooth shade and customization is best determined chairside rather than just sending one shade on a lab slip.  We have several materials and types of porcelain that we can use with the CEREC machine which are the same choices that dental labs use.  I think that you are always going to get a strong, natural looking crown ( with no metal), when you go to a dentist that can provide a CEREC crown.  Be careful of the dentists that put the CEREC crowns down because it usually means they have never made one and they have not made the considerable investment and committment to the new technology that will be here to stay.

Whether you choose a CEREC crown over a lab crown depends on your expectations and what satisfies them. If you aren't too picky about the esthetic result and are primarily concerned about a decent fit and function in a single appointment crown then CEREC is for you. There are a lot of different shade porcelain blocks available now and some blend in fairly nicely. But not always. This becomes more challenging as you move to the front teeth. Unless the dentist is willing to spend additional time in his lab custom staining and glazing then firing in a porcelain furnace and all of the other extra time-consuming laboratory steps needed to make this esthetically acceptable it will most likely have a generic appearance.......speaking from experience as a former CEREC dentist. 

The only advantage is that its one visit rather than two.  The total time in the dental chair is probably longer during that one visit than the total time of the two visits combined with other crown procedures. 

The procedure might be better for the dentist because he can eliminate the lab technician, and the associated lab fees.  Over the long term this could be a significant savings for the dentist.

I would say that a cerec crown is more of a potential net-disadvantage from the patients perspective.

Best,

Dr. Alper

One of the biggest advantages of Cerec crowns are the ability to have your crown cemented on the same day you have the tooth prepared.  This reduces your number of visits to the dental office.  One of the biggest disadvantages is the aesthetic consideration when dealing with front teeth.  Using a Cerec machine does not give you the great flexibility that a dental technician/Ceramist has in manipulating the colour and details of a crown.  There are some dentists out there that can achieve great aesthetic results with  Cerec crowns but it is not easy.  I would recommend to ask for before and after photos.

There definitely is an advantage of having a crown made at the time of the dental visit.  It eliminates a second visit and the chances that a temporary crown falls off or is sensitive.   I personally prefer to use a lab technician as the labs have a variety of different materials to choose from.  Whether I want a LAVA zirconium crown or a pressed ceramic E-max crown, I can choose that.  As materials change and technology improves, I have the flexiblity to choose that material and I am not stuck with what I own.