CEREC in The Dalles, OR

Dentistry has developed significantly over the last couple of decades, making dental procedures more convenient and easy, allowing the patients to get the treatment completed in a very short time span. CEREC - Chairside Economical Restoration using Esthetic Ceramic is one such development and is the modern-day method of fabricating dental restorations like crowns, veneers, bridges, and other ceramic restorations.

What does CEREC involve?

Traditionally, when you visit your dentist to get a crown done, the dentist would ask you to bite into a gooey mass to take an impression of the tooth and use this mold as a reference for fabricating the crown in a dental laboratory using ceramic material. The major disadvantage of this process is that this would usually take a couple of weeks, and meanwhile, the patient will have to use a temporary crown to protect the prepared tooth surface.

However, with CEREC, all these procedures can be completed very quickly. The dentist will use a digital hand-held scanning tool to scan and create a highly accurate digital impression of the teeth.  The images rendered by the scans will be projected on a computer screen, which can be analyzed from multiple angles and is sent to a computer-aided milling machine, which precisely carves out the restoration from a block of dental-grade ceramic. The crown would offer a perfect fit and aesthetics.

Advantages of CEREC

• It can be fabricated in a single visit to the dentist’s practice, thus eliminating the waiting period.
• It eliminates the need for temporary restoration when the permanent one is being fabricated. 
• The accuracy of the crown’s fit and contour will be excellent. 
• Unlike traditional methods, digital scanning eliminates the need to bite into a gooey mass to make a mold of the teeth.
• CEREC can be used to fabricate various types of dental restorations, such as crowns, veneers, bridges, etc.