Why Patients Chose CEREC

A crown is designed to protect a tooth. Over the years our teeth are subject to a lot of wear and tear. A crown may be recommended for a number of reasons including:

• fractured or broken
• heavily decayed
• large fillings
• a tooth which has had a root canal
• cosmetic correction

A popular choice is the CEREC crown, which is made out of a very strong ceramic and is designed, created and installed using computer assisted technology. Sunderland Dental offers CEREC technology. CEREC stands for Chairside Economic Restoration of Esthetic Ceramics.

CEREC Benefits

Same day procedure! Rather than wait 2 weeks for your crown, you can walk in and out of our office within a few hours with your new crown. What does this mean for you? Fewer injections, less drilling, and less time out of your hectic schedule for dental visits. Dr. Sunderland will use computer
aided design (CAD) and manufacturing (CAM) to capture digital images of your tooth to create a strong, esthetic crown all in the office.

The CAD/CAM system has been on the market for over thirty years now and has advanced with technology over the years. A CEREC crown is the next closest material to your natural tooth structure and patients have said that it feels like a natural tooth where as some of the other materials feel ‘foreign’ in your mouth.

CEREC Procedure

If you have ever seen a 3-D printer at work then you may be able to grasp how a CEREC crown unfolds.

1. Open wide for the camera. We will take an optical impression/digital picture of your prepared tooth.
2. The CAD/CAM technology that took the digital images will create a digital model of your tooth.
3. The milling machine takes the model and creates or mills a 3-D tooth out of ceramic. This process takes about 15 minutes.
4. Your tooth is fitted in your mouth. We then take the crown and ‘fire’ it in a furnace. The crown goes thru a crystallization process in which the ceramic becomes the hardest and reaches the desired color as well. This process takes approximately 20 minutes.
5. Dr. Sunderland fits the crown and bonds it into place.