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Dr Sandy Says – Dental Crowns

See our video from Dr. Sandy Iyer the principal dentist at KR Dental and senior dental assistant Margret talk about Dental Crowns,‘who needs them?’ and the benefit of Dental Crown.

Check out our Crown and Bridges page for more details.

Captions:

Marg: Dr Iyer, we have a lot of patients calling up and asking about the difference about ‘crowns’, ‘bridges’ and ‘veneer’, could you help explain that please.

Dr. Iyer: Marg of course I can.

So basically, a crown, sometimes people also call it a cap. It’s more like a helmet that sits on top of the tooth. What a crown is really good for is protecting teeth and making them stronger.

So basically, as we know, what I find is as people get older their teeth get older. They tend to have more wear and tear on their teeth. They tend to have a few cracks on their teeth.

Also, some people who had large amalgam fillings placed on their teeth when they were younger, those people I find tend to have more cracks on their teeth and people who grind and there’s various things around that.

It’s usually these kind of people with these cracks on their teeth all they need to do is on an unsuspecting Sunday afternoon, they could be eating a bit of bread with those little seeds in it or they could have bitten down into an olive with a little pit in it. And these cracks in teeth they open up and eventually or unexpectedly the tooth could actually split in the middle. That can be quite painful to some people.

So, when I see a crack in a patient’s mouth, especially on a chewing tooth. I might recommend to them that they get a crown put on that tooth. The whole point of that is the crown sits on top of the tooth much like a little helmet sits on top of the tooth. So, when people bite down on harder surfaces there’s no splitting of teeth the crack is not activated it’s all protected with this little cap that sits on top of the whole tooth. It makes that tooth stronger; it gives more life to that tooth.