How CEREC Can Be Used to Restore Your Damaged Tooth

Our Bellevue dental office offers CEREC as an alternative to traditional dental crowns. This solution is affordable and durable while looking entirely natural. Simultaneously, it is a much faster procedure. Still, most people are unaware of the advantages of using this technology. With that in mind, here is what you need to know.

Restoring Teeth In a Single Sitting

CEREC is an Acronym that stands for Chairside Economical Restoration of Esthetic Ceramics. As the name implies, it is a very advanced technique that restores injured, damaged, missing or broken teeth with a ceramic material that closely matches the color and appearance of your natural teeth.

Regardless of how careful, or even fortunate, one may be, very few people go through life without suffering some damage to their teeth. If your teeth sustain damage from periodontal disease, an unfortunate accident or any other reason, you know how difficult it is to go through life feeling self-conscious every time you smile. Other people who have misaligned or irregularly shaped teeth may desire a new look. Fortunately, we can take care of any and all of these problems with various tooth restorations. Our restorations can replace missing teeth, repair teeth and more. The easiest and quickest way to do this is using CEREC, an advanced technique that allows us to complete virtually all tooth restorations in a single sitting.

Examples of restorations include the following:

• Inlays:
• An inlay is the technique by which a dental impression is used to fabricate a solid ceramic piece that directly corresponds to the shape of a cavity and is then cemented to the tooth.
• Onlays:
• An onlay is exactly the same thing as an inlay, except it covers the tooth, or the elevated and pointed part of the tooth.
• Crowns:
• Crowns are tooth-colored caps that fit tightly over damaged or discolored teeth.
• Bridges:
• Bridges fill the gaps left by missing teeth, with natural looking artificial teeth, which are anchored on either side by crowns.
• Veneers:
• Veneers are wafer-thin customized shells that resemble and are bonded to, your natural teeth.

Traditional restoration methods involved biting into the semi-solid material in a special tray. The material hardened and formed a negative imprint of the teeth and gums from which a plaster cast was made. The old process then involved making a prosthesis device from this cast in a lab. While reliable, this method has its drawbacks. It is messy, tastes bad and often causes the patient to gag.

CEREC does away with the need for messy impressions and never-ending visits to the dentist for fittings. As a dentist who specializes in CEREC, we will take a digital picture of your tooth or if need be, the entire jaw. Special software then converts this image into a 3-dimensional virtual model on our computer. As you watch, we will design your restoration on the screen, a process that only takes a few minutes. We will then send the design to an onsite CEREC Milling Unit, which will carve a solid block of tooth-colored ceramic into the precise shape of the needed restoration. Again this usually only takes 15 to 20 minutes. As a final step, we will make sure that the restoration fits properly and comfortably before polishing and bonding it into place.

CEREC allows us to design, construct, and insert individual ceramic restorations in a single appointment. You cannot ask for anything better other than teeth that are naturally perfect and undamaged. and how many of us have those? Call us today at (425) 249-9186 and have your teeth restored in a single sitting by experienced and capable CEREC dentist.