I hate dental crowns and caps ... this statement may surprise you coming from dentist with more than 25 years experience (15 of those years as a holistic dentist). After all, caps and dentists go together like salt and pepper. Dental crowns are put on a pedestal as being the most permanent of all dental restorations. So what gives ... why am I saying that caps are no good?
This scenario may sound familiar to many of you:
* You have a cavity in your tooth
* Your friendly dentist places a restoration (perhaps dental amalgam or composite resin) to repair your tooth
* After a while the restoration fails or the tooth cracks
* Your tooth is now crowned with metal, porcelain or ceramic fused to gold
* The procedure of crowning the tooth destroys the nerve
* Dead nerves are painful and need to be treated with either a root canal procedure or an extraction
The crown procedure is very traumatic and often kills the tooth nerve. To crown a tooth, the dentist must grind away all of the enamel and a significant amount of the dentin that makes up the inner tooth core. Studies have shown that as many as 15% of crowned teeth will experience complications serious enough to kill the tooth nerve. Just because your crowned tooth did not need an extraction or root canal does not mean you're free and clear of future problems.
Despite the fact that crowns are usually called "permanent", they don't last for a lifetime. Believe it or not, the normal lifespan of a crown is actually about ten years. Most dental insurance plans will pay for a new crown if it breaks down after just five years. Most dental patients cannot understand how the crown can decay ... how could a product made of ceramic or gold get a cavity? No one wants to invest another large chunk of money to re-fix the tooth that they believed was already repaired in a very permanent way.
Typically, the dentist will not have good explanations regarding why capped teeth break down. They will frequently construct analogies to repairing your teeth and fixing your car ... that absolutely nothing mechanical can last forever. Some may even suggest that something that you did or perhaps didn't do allowed the crown to break down. The most common justification is your inadequate dental hygiene as well as sporadic dental cleanings are to blame. Some might convince you that because you allowed microbial plaque to amass along the gum line, a cavity developed and the cap failed. However your other teeth are fine, so this doesn't make sense--except of course if you just neglected to brush one tooth ... the crowned one.
If you're a thinking individual, the warning flags ought to be soaring about now ... that story does not exactly seem sensible. The key reason crowns break down after a while is due to a basic engineering mistake. Caps are constructed of materials that happen to be relatively rigid ... ceramic, metal or ceramic fused to metal. Surprisingly, the teeth are actually very bendable. There' re designed to bend at the gum line under chewing forces.
So each time you chew, the ensuing tug-of-war generates tension and strain along the gum-line, causing the seal between your tooth and cap to weaken. In the absence of a good quality seal, microbes can get between the tooth and crown--creating a cavity. Your dentist will likely call this a leaky cap. You call it an absolute bummer!
So then, what is the solution to the challenge of leaky caps? Wouldn't it make sense to rebuild your teeth in ways that mimic like they function naturally? That's the specific objective of the division of dental technology often called biomimetic dentistry. This can be done by simply avoiding crowns on teeth an by using elastic materials at the gum line. By creating restored teeth that will mimic nature, the restorations are not destined to leak and even unanticipated root canals will be essentially eliminated.
Biomimetic dental procedures are perfect substitutes to caps, replicate the natural teeth during function, offer very long-lasting dental corrections and radically reduce the requirement for root canal treatment.
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