100% Porcelain crowns replace old porcelain fused to metal crowns

Case of the week

Grace has disliked her old porcelain fused to metal crowns for about 30 years.  This was totally unknown to our office until I added the question “Is there anything you are unhappy with?” to my regular examination chit-chat.  90-95% of the time people say no or crack a joke about being unhappy about something that a dentist has no control over; the weather, the economy or some non-dental health issue.  Occasionally, someone makes a comment about something I can help them with though.  Well on a summer day last year Grace was in for her cleaning I asked her if there was anything she wasn’t happy with.  She mentioned, almost in passing,  that she has never liked the black lines at her gumline, but what could she do about it?  I told her today’s ceramics are more than strong enough to be used anywhere in the mouth and that metal is not needed at all.  Here is a case of entirely ceramics.

Well she was very excited and we scheduled her for new ceramic crowns on the old porcelain fused to metal crowns.  The result was fantastic!

In this photo you can see the black lines are gone. More interesting is you can see how well we matched her existing real tooth (the one with the red star). She was not interested in re-doing her whole smile in the Hollywood style, but instead desired a natural smile that fit the rest of her teeth. We were able to provide her with that!

I occasionally work with several dental product companies and thought this was a nice case to showcase a newer product being used.  The product is irreverent to the lay-person, but suffice to say was interesting enough to publish in one of our dental journals.  I got some nice feedback from several dentists around the country on the article, so I know it was helpful to some.  More importantly though, Grace loves her new smile!

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