CEREC

Your tooth will be prepared in the normal way as it would before fitting a crown or a veneer.

At this point, instead of using a messy dental impression of your tooth, a digital image is taken using a hi-tech camera. This image is then converted into a 3D computerised model of your tooth, which is used as a guide to design your new restoration.

Once we are happy with the newly designed tooth, this data is sent to an onsite milling machine, which fabricates your new tooth from a high-quality ceramic block. The milling process can take anywhere from as little as 6 minutes to 30 minutes depending on the complexity of the tooth.

The ceramic blocks come in a wide variety of shades and colours. One will be selected to match your surrounding teeth. Once the crown or veneer has been milled, the dentist may characterise it and stain it to match your surrounding teeth, before either polishing it or glazing it in a furnace.

Your new restoration will then be cemented into place onto your prepared tooth.

There are several advantages to having treatment with CEREC over conventional, laboratory- made restorations:

Everything is carried out in a single visit – you only need to visit the dentist once – take one day away from your work or life to have the procedure – instead of the usual two or three visits.

Only one set of local anaesthetic injections – since the entire procedure can be carried out within the hour, you only need to have one lot of anaesthetic.

Your Dentist is in complete control of the final result – since the crown or veneer is designed and fabricated from start to finish by your Dentist, they have total control over how it will look and fit, whereas a crown made in a laboratory is under the control of the technician who hasn’t seen the patient.

No temporary restorations – Temporaries have been known to fall off and cause problems, which is a step not required any longer with CEREC treatment.