What are dental bridges and crowns?

Teeth problems are common to everybody, but your dentist has solutions for them. With missing teeth, problems like reduced functionality, appearance, and gaps between the teeth may arise. Whereas with decayed teeth, problems like toothache, discoloration and food particles getting stuck inside the decayed portion are quite frequent. For problems such as these, dental crowns and dental bridges can be the solutions.

Dental crowns are used when your natural teeth have been decayed, discolored chipped or misshapen. The crown is like a cap that is fitted onto your natural tooth, thereby allowing you to get a tooth that looks good and without any decay. In order to get started, your decayed tooth is shaven down to fit the cap on the remaining part of your tooth. Doing this will increase the functionality of your tooth—you could probably chew more properly or close your mouth properly.

Dental bridges are used when you have a tooth missing. In place of that empty space created by your missing tooth, an artificial one will be placed with the adjacent teeth used as anchors. This reduces the formation of gaps between the rest of the teeth, improves your dental appearance, improves the functionality and speech.

The difference between a dental crown and a dental bridge is that a dental crown is used when the teeth are not missing, but are decayed, discolored or misshapen. It is fixed onto your shaven down natural tooth. On the other hand, a dental bridge fills the gap of the missing tooth with an artificial one. In a dental crown procedure, the problematic tooth is shaven down; whereas, in a dental bridge procedure, the tooth on either side of the missing tooth/teeth are shaven down to be used as anchors which are the caps or the crowns.

Dental crowns and dental bridges do last for a few years, but they can also bring up problems later in life. The underlying shaven down tooth has chances of getting decayed, which poses as an additional problem and in the end, you might have to get the shaven down tooth/teeth removed.

We are Here to Help

To get all your teeth problems resolved, do visit our dental clinic, Implants Guru, in Rancho Mirage, California. We love helping people with their dental problems, especially community members from, Palm Desert and Palm Springs. We help you bring the best smile to your face.