Crowns and bridges are great. We use them every day. Most commonly, what I see is a fractured tooth or a tooth with a big old metal filling that’s failing.
It’s got decay under it. These metal fillings tend to put crack lines and fractures on your teeth that, frankly, they act like kind of like a wedge. That metal filling, when you chew on it, it flexes your tooth back and forth.
And over time, the stress of that and repetitively chewing, when we think about how often we use our teeth every day, we rely on them heavily, especially these molars that do 90% of the work. At some point, that tooth’s going to say, I’ve had enough, and it breaks. A cusp falls off, half of the tooth breaks.
We can use a crown to build that tooth back up and to cover it completely so these fracture lines can’t propagate. They can’t get bigger. And you don’t have to worry about potentially losing that tooth if you break it further.
Bridges are great. They’re an option for if you have, you know, two teeth on the side of a space somewhere in your mouth where you’re missing a tooth, we can use the two adjacent teeth to the space there to make it look like you have a full set of teeth. The bridge itself is one piece, sits on top of the teeth.
And the way that it’s shaped and the way that it’s made, it makes it look like the tooth coming out of the space is emerging naturally from the gums.
