Dental Bridges: Porcelain and Porcelain-to-Metal
Are you missing 1 or more teeth? If so, there are several options for you to get them replaced so that you can eat better and smile with confidence, including Dental Implants, Dental Bridges, and Partial/Complete Dentures. To be completely honest.......I can't stand doing dentures, so the best I can do there is refer you to a great guy. But for bridges and dental implants......read on!
Until a few years ago, we usually needed a bridge with a gold framework to support the porcelain for strength, but that's changed due to an amazing material called "Zirconia." Technically, Zirconia is actually a metal, so we can't really claim it's "metal-free," but given that it's completely white, you can't tell it's not! Here's an example of a bridge like this:
Looking at a bridge on a mirror doesn't tell you how it will transform your smile, though, so see what you think of these Smile Transformations done with Zirconia bridges:
Tara had an old porcelain-to-metal bridge that didn't look so hot anymore, as well as a missing tooth top left back, and with a big birthday coming up, she wanted her smile to look a LOT better. We'll do the other side soon, but she chose to do Opalescence Teeth Whitening first so that we could then match her beautiful white teeth, and then we completed the upper left bridge (6 teeth altogether), and she told us that she felt like it was one of the best birthday presents she'd ever had!
Gerard had long been unhappy with his top right bridge, and his big event for which we HAD to fix his smile was his WEDDING! A combination of Opalescence Teeth Whitening, some slight reshaping and smoothing of the rough edges, and a 5-tooth Zirconia bridge made an incredible difference. Don't you think he felt good smiling for his wedding photos?
Shelly had an old porcelain-to-metal bridges hated how it looked. She chose Zirconia dental bridges to replace her top front 4 missing teeth (2 teeth on each side hold it up), along with porcelain veneers on the lower front teeth, porcelain bridges on the lower back teeth both sides, and some all-porcelain crowns.
Digital Dental Impressions
Here's another reall cool feature of our CEREC AC Bluecam that VERY few other dentists in Charlotte can offer, and what a difference it makes in your COMFORT and CONVENIENCE: even for complex, difficult types of dentistry that have to be done by a dental lab, we no longer have to use that gooey, yucky impression material to make the molds! If you've ever had these impressions taken, you know they're not much fun. We use DIGITAL impressions, and they're amazingly accurate -- in fact, due to numerous technical issues, they are MORE accurate than the old-fashioned dental molds. Here's what it looks like:
And not only is this more comfortable for you, we can literally send it over the web before you've even left the chair and have the lab verify everything looks great, so there's really minimal chance of ever having to come back for a new impression, and these never go bad, either, unlike conventional, old-fashioned molds.