Posted in Emergency Care
Posted on November, 17 2023 by Gerald M. Marlin, DMD, MSDWith Dental Emergencies, Can Cracked Teeth Be Repaired and Look Natural, Quickly?
If you have a dental emergency and crack a tooth, it’s important to repair your smile, and not just for aesthetic reasons. A cracked tooth can allow bacteria to access the sensitive nerve tissue inside your tooth, which can cause pain, inflammation, and even infection [1].
When dealing with a cracked tooth that visibly impacts your smile, you need to know that it can be repaired quickly and look natural. At Elite Prosthetic Dentistry, with our own in-house laboratory, we are used to rapidly restoring the broken dentition allowing our patients to quickly return to their normal routines.
Types of Accidents That Can Crack Teeth
There are several reasons teeth can crack. Injuries such as falls, impacts, or car accidents can crack and break teeth. Biting into hard foods, such as popcorn kernels, bones, or fruit pits, can also cause teeth to crack, especially if they are already weakened.
A tooth may also be weakened due to tooth decay or teeth grinding, which may cause normal biting and chewing pressure to crack teeth. Patients with a misaligned bite are also more susceptible to fractures in their teeth than those with a properly aligned smile [2].
How to Get a Natural-Looking Restoration Quickly
If you have cracked a tooth, you know how much even a single damaged tooth can impact your smile. As such, it’s understandable that you would want a rapid repair after such an accident.
So how can you get a natural-looking restoration quickly for a cracked tooth?
- Work with an experienced dentist. Working with the right dental professional is crucial. Not every dentist has the same experience restoring cracked teeth in a way that allows for a natural appearance, especially when using temporary crowns. Look for a dentist with specialized training and years of experience repairing damaged teeth for a natural-looking result, such as a prosthodontist.
- Ask about their restoration techniques. Many dentists have on-site machines that can make stock restorations such as dental crowns within a few hours and market the technology as suc, but this technology is not designed to create truly custom crowns that allow for the unique nuances of every tooth. Often, these crowns need multiple adjustments and can ultimately look less than natural in the mouth. The results are also subject to each dentist’s particular training and experience using the machine [3]. Ask the dentist if they use machine milling to create the restoration or if they have them custom fabricated in a lab.
- Look for a practice with an in-house lab. The ideal situation is a practice with an in-house lab where experienced technicians design and craft the restoration for your specific smile rather than a third-party lab or machine milling. Dentists with an in-house lab can fabricate the most natural appearing restorations quickly, down to the unique internal color and translucency of your teeth.
Start Smiling Again
Elite Prosthetic Dentistry exclusively uses our private, in-house lab to fabricate dental restorations for cracked teeth quickly for patients with natural-looking results.
We are able to accommodate emergency appointments, so if you are dealing with a cracked tooth but do not want an artificial-looking, temporary repair, contact Elite Prosthetic Dentistry.
With our decades of experience, private lab, and unparalleled attention to detail, we will ensure that your smile looks natural again in no time.
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Dr. Gerald Marlin is Recognized as One of the Washington D.C. Region’s Leading ‘Problem Solving’ Cosmetic Dentistry and Dental Implant Restoration Specialists. Since the time that he established his practice, Dr. Gerald Marlin has maintained “an unwavering dedication to excellence.” Through this commitment, Dr. Marlin provides his patients with long-lasting (35 years vs the national average of 7-10 years), optimally aesthetic restorations that have virtually no future problems.