Restorative Dentistry Services at South Lakewood Dental In Lakewood CO

Crowns! Now there's a word that brings memories to most of us who have crowns would like to forget! For many years the choice was - get a crown or lose the tooth! Enter progress - “biomimetics”!

Biomimetics - Bio (nature) + Mimetic (mimicking) = Mimicking nature

Teeth bend. Teeth flex. Teeth expand and contract. Teeth absorb stress and pressure - if they didn't, they would fracture to pieces. Crowns do not bend, or flex, or expand and contract like a tooth - they are rigid. So what happens when you put a rigid crown on a “flexible” tooth? Decay, infection and/or abscess, pain, root canals, extraction, possible implant to replace the tooth - sound familiar? To be fair, a percentage of crowns are successful, but there is a better way to restore significantly damaged teeth and get a more predictably successful long term result. If you’ve had a crown, you know that the tooth is ground down to a fraction of its original size to allow room for a crown to be made to cover it. There’s the problem - most of the protective structure of the tooth (in many cases healthy structure) is removed! This is big trauma for the tooth and what is left is expected to support the crown and last for years - good luck! Enter biomimetics - only the damaged portion of the tooth is removed (decay, fractures) and any remaining old fillings / restorations. Then, using non-metal, life-like materials, the tooth is “rebuilt” layer by layer just like the real tooth. So, it can bend, it can flex, it can expand and contract and it can absorb stress and pressure as it was naturally designed to do! The tooth is completely sealed from the inside out so nothing can get inside to cause more decay or infection.

This is all done in one appointment - no temporaries and no coming back to fit the crown! Is this really possible - yes!

We invite you to join the many delighted patients who are enjoying “biomimetically restored” teeth!

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