A crown or a filling for you?

Oh oh...broken front tooth.  Crown needed. 

Visit to the dentist, freeze it up, grind it down.  Impression taken, temporary placed.  It's a single front tooth, so off to the lab for a custom shade match.  Wait a few weeks.  Oops, temporary fell off....cold sensitive plus another visit to the office.  Back for the crown insert....oh no, crown doesn't look quite right.  Back to the lab, temporary annoying.  Back to the office for the insert again.  Looks pretty good, hope it doesn't get that dark edge at the gumline!  Out to the front desk....ouch, painful bill for all that work.

Or how about another storyline? Visit your Bioclear Method dentist.  Tip back in the chair and have the tooth built up, not ground down into a small peg. Tooth is matched right there and then with the proper shade of highly esthetic composite resin.  Final shaping and polishing to a high shine and off you go!  Out to the front to pay the bill....hmmm, not so bad and I love my new tooth!

Which one of those sound better?  Of course, dental crowns will remain a cornerstone treatment for many dental problems.  But with recent advances in filling techniques and materials, we can do a lot more before getting to the extreme of crowning a tooth. 

When you consider that preparing a tooth for a crown can involve the removal of up to 75% of the volume of tooth structure above the gumline, a crown simply cannot be considered a conservative or minimally invasive treatment.  And unfortunately when we grind so much away, we often run into complications with the "nerve" (dental pulp) of the tooth.  The advantage of the Bioclear Method of treatment is that there is almost no additional reduction of natural tooth structure in most cases. And because there is no lab involved, the treatments can be done cost effectively, usually in a single visit. 

Check it out on the Google!