Dental Crowns Aren't Your Best Choice

Does it surprise you to hear a holistic dentist with more than 25 years experience tell you to avoid dental crowns and caps? After all, most dentists love to cap teeth. Dental crowns are put on a pedestal as being the most permanent of all dental restorations. So how could a dentist be telling you to avoid caps and crowns?

This scenario may sound familiar to many of you:

* You're told you have a cavity

* An amalgam or a composite filling is installed to repair the damaged portion of the tooth

* Over time the repair fails or the tooth splits

* A cap (ceramic, metal or maybe porcelain fused to gold) will finally be placed

* Often times the crowning procedure is aggressive enough to trigger your tooth nerve to expire

* Dead nerves cause pain and must be managed by having a root canal procedure or perhaps an extraction

The procedure to crown a tooth is very aggressive and may kill the tooth's nerve. To crown a tooth, the dentist must grind away all of the enamel and a significant amount of the dentin that makes up the inner tooth core. The scientific literature reveals that up to 15% of all crowned teeth will eventually need root canals or extractions because of a dead nerve. If you have a crown and did not need a root canal or an extraction, your troubles are not quite over yet.

Although crowns are usually called "permanent", they won't last forever. In fact, the typical life expectancy of a cap is actually around 10 years. Almost all insurance plans will pay to replace a new crown if it breaks down after just five years. Most dental clients cannot understand how the crown can break down ... how does something composed of porcelain or metal develop a cavity? No one wants to fork out another large chunk of cash to re-fix a tooth they believed had been repaired in a permanent way.

When trying to clarify the reasons why your tooth needs to be treated once again, your dentist may assert things such as: "nothing will last forever" or maybe "the oral cavity is a very hostile environment". He / She may even pass the responsibility on to you by implying that substandard oral hygiene and microbial plaque along the gum line was the reason the crown has failed. The only problem with this answer is that if bad oral cleanliness were to blame, all your teeth would likely be damaged by decay ... not just the single crowned tooth.

If you are a thinking individual, the warning signs should be flying about now ... this story doesn't quite make sense. The main reason caps fail over time is because of a critical design flaw. Crowns are constructed of materials that are quite unbending ... ceramic, metal or porcelain fused to metal. Surprisingly, the teeth are very flexible. There' re intended to flex along the gum line under biting pressure.

So now it is possible to place the pieces together and describe exactly why most caps fail. Anytime the teeth come together (thousands of times per day), the tooth and the cap both want something different. The tooth wants to flex, the cap doesn't. This competition of rival forces builds strain at the gum-line that inevitably breaches the seal in between your crown and your tooth. Once the seal pops and your crown begins to leak, microbes rush in to the space and a cavity develops.

There's a small division of dental technology named biomimetic dentistry that appreciates and deals with the challenge of leaky crowns. For starters, biomimetic dentists rarely if ever install crowns on your teeth. Second of all, they do not ever insert stiff, inflexible materials at the gum line when restoring your teeth. By rebuilding the teeth in ways that simulate nature, leaking caps and "unforeseen root canal treatments" are generally avoided.

Biomimetic dental procedures are perfect alternatives to caps, replicate the natural teeth under function, deliver long-lasting dental corrections and also significantly lessen the need for root canals.