Categories: Tooth Decay/Cavities

Three Ways Dental Crowns Protect Your Smile

Taking care of your smile is a lifelong process, as it involves consistent care and protection. Indeed, a well-rounded preventive routine consists of attending your six-month checkups, taking care to brush and floss properly at home, and paying mind to the negative effects of certain foods and beverages. Even still, you could do everything correctly, and yet hyperactive oral bacteria could have other plans. In today’s blog, your Dallas, TX dentist explains the importance behind restorative dentistry, and how dental crowns can protect your smile in multiple ways.

Preventing Bacteria from Spreading

While prevention is the best practice for promoting a healthy smile, there comes a time where everyone slips up regarding their routine. Whether it involves rushing out of the house one morning and forgetting to brush, or writing off your dental examinations as unimportant, our defense goes down at one point or another. When this occurs, however, your chances of developing oral concerns increases greatly.

To ensure your smile is properly protected in the event prevention falls short, your dentist may recommend restorative treatments. Restorative dentistry aims to remove whatever threat is plaguing your oral health and reinforce your natural teeth. What’s more? Concerns that impact your function and health can range drastically, and as such, quality custom care is needed.

One such restoration that is popular due to its versatility includes the dental crown, which consists of a hollow cap designed to fit directly over a tooth and is secured tightly. These restorations are helpful when dealing with cases of decay, as they can prevent the infection from spreading to surrounding healthy teeth.

Ensuring Proper Healing

Restorative dental crowns are also great for healing purposes. Let’s say, for example, an individual is experiencing significant effects from decay that has spread internally in a tooth. Your dentist would address this concern with root canal therapy, in which we carefully but thoroughly remove any sign of the infection in the dental pulp. After this step, a material is used to fill the open canals so that your tooth’s structure does not compromise.

Once your root canal treatment is complete, your structure and nerves will need time to heal. Extreme temperature differences can cause significant pain and damage to your healing nerves, which complicates the process. By placing a cap atop the treated structure, your smile can heal properly.

Reinforcing Your Strength

In addition to preventing infection from spreading and ensuring proper healing, another important function behind crowns involves their ability to help reinforce your natural strength. The last thing you or your dentist wants is for you to lose a healthy permanent tooth, and crowns can help protect them from outside threats and other harms.