Case Background
This lady attended Dr. Kelly at our clinic a few week ago. As a young adult, she had suffered trauma to an upper front incisor tooth. The tooth was filled and re-filled several times over a 15 year period. The filling is dark in colour and the surface is dull and lifeless looking. The patient is understandibly unhappy with the appearance of the tooth. She tells us that she avoids smiling in photographs and it has now reached the point where she tends to cover her mouth with her hand when speaking and meeting with new people – she is terribly self conscious and now wants to look at sorting out the dark tooth.
What We Did
After discussing the various options with the patient, we decided that the ideal solution here would be placement of an all ceramic crown to restore tooth shape, colour and character. The patient was happy to proceed, so a thorough clinical assessment was carried out, a pre-operative digital x-ray and digital photographs were taken.
Details records of the tooth are prepared. Many factors are considered included tooth colour (hue, value and chroma), anatomy, characterisations etc. These are all conveyed to the ceramist who takes everything into consideration when making the new crown.
In some situations, we will have the ceramist see the patient in person just prior to making the crown. Thankfully, with advances in technology and through the use of colour corrected lighting and digital photography, we are often able to avoid this extra step.
The crown is returned from the lab 2-3 weeks later and it is checked and prepared prior to bonding in place.
We use special cement to bond the crown in place. This photograph was taken immediately after cementation of the crown. It is usually best to take final photographs 1-2 weeks after placement to allow the gum margins to settle around the crown.
As you can see, we managed to achieve a superb result here and the patient was delighted with her new crown.
Our sincere thanks to Gary from Swift Ceramics for the wonderful laboratory work carried out here. Crowns like this take considerable skill and require a talented ceramist to achieve such results.
