Forget the Temps. We Offer Same-Day Crowns

Dental crowns are an important part of the tooth restoration arsenal at Desert Dental in North Hollywood, California. As well as having the ability to improve the appearance of a tooth, crowns help preserve teeth with damage or too many fillings or a tooth that has undergone a root canal. Crowns can even serve as a foundation for dental bridges. 

While versatile, getting a traditional crown involves a somewhat slow process because your dentist must prepare the tooth to receive a crown, use a mold to take an imprint, and send the impression to a dental lab where technicians custom manufacture your crown.

The finished product is ready in about a week to 10 days. In the meantime, you’re fitted with a temporary crown, also known as a “temp.”

At Desert Dental, however, there’s no need to wait for your crown or to live with a temp. We provide our patients with same-day crowns, utilizing in-office CAD/CAM milling based on digital impressions. It’s a cleaner, more comfortable process provided on a one-and-done basis. 

Digital impressions

Traditional dental impressions use awkward and unwieldy trays filled with sticky alginate. Anyone who’s had impressions taken this way knows the claustrophobic feeling of having their mouth filled with trays and molding material while it sets. 

Enter the iTero® digital scanner, a probe that’s sized more like a toothbrush. Creating a full-mouth impression is as simple as moving the scanner around your mouth as it builds an accurate and complete digital model of your teeth. 

For creating a same-day crown, we first prepare your tooth by removing some enamel to accommodate the crown, and then we use iTero to create a digital impression. With this precision representation stored in a computer, we move to the next phase — manufacture. 

Milling your crown

Once we have the digital scan, advanced software creates the instructions for making your crown. The process starts with a block of material, usually ceramic, that’s larger than your tooth.

Placed in a milling machine, the digital impression provides extremely precise information to the computer-aided manufacturing device. In 20 minutes, the block is shaped into a crown that closely matches your natural teeth. 

Upon completion, we permanently bond the crown to the prepared tooth. You’re ready to go after an appointment that usually takes two hours or less, from start to finish, with no temporary crown or two-week wait for a final fitting. 

To learn more about same-day crowns in consultation with the team at Desert Dental, call or click to make an appointment today.