Watch: Make And Fit Your Crown In One Visit

If you are considering getting a crown, you might have heard about same-day crowns. A same-day crown means you only need to come in for a single appointment.

CEREC Technology Same-Day Crowns

This is made possible by a CEREC machine.

CEREC stands for Chairside Economical Restoration of Aesthetic Ceramics
and it part of the newest developments in digital dentistry technology CAD/CAM. CAD stands for computer aided designing and CAM stands for computer aided manufacturing.

The system combines a milling machine, CAD/CAM programs and 3D imaging which allows dentists to create dental restorations within hours in their practices.

CEREC is a commonly used product, especially with their website stating that every 5 seconds a patient is treated with CEREC around the world.

What is the process of getting a same-day crown?

If your dental examination showed that you will need a crown, your dentist will discuss the option of same-day crowns with you. This means you will only have to come in for a single appointment.

We have listed the steps of an appointment at GC Dental below for you:

1. Impression Scan – Instead of using impression material and a tray that usually gets inserted into your mouth to take an impression of your upper and lower jaw, CEREC uses a camera scanner. This scanner provides our dentists with precise 3D images of your teeth in their natural colour.
2. Crown Design – The CEREC software will analyse the scan of your mouth and digitally generate the restoration proposal. This will only take a few minutes which makes the process much faster than sending the impressions to a dental laboratory.
3. Crown Production – The software submits your crown design to the CEREC milling machine which mills and grinds a solid zirconia blank to cut the unique crown that was designed for you.
4. Finishing & Insertion – The dentist will sinter and glaze your crown to achieve a long-lasting restoration. Our dentist will insert your crown and you will walk out of the practice with your newly placed restoration.

Benefits of Same-Day Crowns

• Saving Time – Patients only have to come in once for the whole process – from impression taking to insertion.
• Cost Effectiveness – By cutting out the dental laboratory, there won’t be any laboratory fees for the restoration so that money can be saved for the patient.
• Clinical safety – According to Dentsply Sirona, the inventor of CEREC, more than 250 scientific studies have proven the clinical safety of CEREC.2

What is a dental crown?

Dental crowns are restorations that can be used when patients have chipped, broken or discoloured teeth, gaps in their smile or a very large filling that needs to be replaced.

You can compare a crown to a beanie that covers most part of the visible part of your tooth. The dentist will remove some of the front, back and sides of your original tooth. This will leave you with a tooth stump on which the crown will be placed.

Same-Day Crowns vs “Regular” Crowns

One of the main differences between same-day crowns and crowns is the time it takes to create the dental crown. Crowns are built in a dental laboratory, whilst the CEREC machine creates the crown within approximately three hours. The laboratory-made crown can take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks to build.

However, the crowns made by a dental technician are made to match the patients remaining teeth with great accuracy in the exactly same colour, shape and size. In this regard, laboratory-build crowns can be a better solution if you are looking to replace a front tooth.

Due to the same day turnaround of CEREC crowns, you won’t need a temporary replacement tooth which is used when your crown is getting made in a dental laboratory.

In comparison, the laboratory made crown can include different materials (ceramic and metal) whist the CEREC crowns are purely ceramic-based.