At Corporate Pointe Dental, we can complete your smile with quality, functional dental bridges and crowns in Culver City, California. Our dentist uses dental restorations to provide natural-looking replacements that are similar to the adjacent teeth. You are welcome to contact Dr. Sandro Tomita, and learn more about bridges by calling 310-417-8177. See below for more information on these services.
Dental Crowns
Dental Crowns or Caps are prosthetic appliances that are used to restore the function and appearance of teeth, which had been badly destroyed by dental decay, fractured or discolored.
You need a Crown when a large portion of the tooth is lost and a regular filling is not strong enough to provide protection and keep the integrity of the tooth.
Crowns were initially made of metals such as Gold, Silver or other metal alloys. Since they were not esthetically pleasing, a new type of crown was developed which had a metal infrastructure over which porcelain was applied to mimic the appearance of a tooth. This type of Crowns is still widely used today, but with the advancement of technology they are losing ground to All Porcelain Crowns.
Porcelain is esthetically more similar to a natural tooth, does not stain, maintaining its color, but were not strong enough to support the forces of mastication, that’s why it needed to have the metal substructure to reinforce it. It had the drawback of not having a very accurate fit, be very labor intensive to be made and demanded a greater reduction of the underlying tooth to be properly made. With the development of the new materials and techniques the metal is not need anymore, because the new types of porcelain are a lot stronger.
Besides the quality of these new porcelain materials, the techniques have evolved to the Digital age, because these new crowns are designed and manufacture in computer machines. CAD-CAM (Computer Aided Design- Computer Aided Manufacture). If you get a Crown on one of your teeth today, chances are great that it will be made this way.
Dental Crown Procedure
In your visit to have the crown made, the tooth will have to be reduced in size and be properly shaped to receive the crown, so that it will accommodate the thickness of the material and the final crown have the proper size and dimensions of a natural tooth.
Most Dentists still have to take a mold or impression of the teeth to send it to a Dental Laboratory, but now Corporate Pointe Dental offers “Same Day Crowns”!
We invested in a CAD-CAM system to expedite the manufacture of your crown. We usually spend about 30 to 40 minutes working on preparing the tooth, and in another hour or so, we have your crown that can be cemented right away, without the need of another appointment or temporary crowns.
Bridges
A Dental Bridge is made to replace one or more teeth that are missing. It is called a Bridge because we make Crowns on the adjacent teeth to the empty space connecting both. Bridges can also be made connecting Dental Implants. The connecting portion is the Pontic, or the structure that replaces and simulates the presence of the missing tooth. Its main purpose is to reestablish the chewing surface that was lost, but it also helps stabilize the other teeth, that otherwise could shift and migrate.
Bridges are cemented in place and stay fixated to the teeth, not needing to be removed.
Although Bridges are the traditional way to replace missing teeth, nowadays there is a better alternative to the bridges, the Dental Implants.
The disadvantages of a Bridge are that the adjacent teeth have to be ground down to receive the crowns that hold the bridge, especially when they are intact, and they are very difficult to maintain.
