Shelby Township, Macomb County Dentist Discusses Difference Between Dental Crowns

Hi, I’m Dr. Heather Pranzarone Stratton at HPS Advanced Dental Care. We’re a holistic dental office located in Shelby Township, Michigan, and I wanted to talk today about different types of crowns. I had a patient come in today and say, “I saw your video about how people get dark lines around their crowns. I’m not getting a crown like that today, am I? “ I said, “No, actually you’re going to be getting a zirconia fused to porcelain crown, which you’ll be able to see.”

A porcelain fused zirconia crown is all nice and white. The inside is made out of zirconia substructure. Which we know in dentistry is one of the most bio-compatible materials known to us in dentistry. That’s important to us and it’s important to you. It’s important to us because we want to give all of our patients the most bio-compatible materials that we’re aware of. It’s also important because a lot of our holistic patients are looking for that. So that’s why it’s important for everybody that we’re using this type of crown.

We get a lot of questions asking if it is a CEREC crown. No, this is actually a crown fabricated by a laboratory. The CEREC machine is not able to fabricate a zirconia crown yet because we know that zirconia is extremely hard. It’s extremely hard material. It’s actually harder than metal.

But it’s more aesthetic and it’s more cosmetic looking so you won’t get those dark lines at the gum line that sometimes you see when people have crowns. It looks more natural. It’s more translucent looking so it looks more like natural teeth and also it’s so much more biocompatible. So, you can see with a zirconian crown it’s all nice and white and tooth colored, inside and out.

In contrast to that, we have our porcelain fuse to metal crown, which has been the gold standard in the industry for years and years and years. We don’t really place those anymore. We can if somebody requests them but a porcelain fused to metal crown has a metal substructure to it. So when we do place a porcelain infused to metal crown, we use high noble metals. Those metals that we use are silver, platinum, palladium and gold so they are high noble metal.

Some patients don’t want that because it’s not as biocompatible as the zirconium crowns and also there is always a risk that we run of having that black line that you can see at that gum line. So, those are the differences between the 2 types of crowns.

There’s always gold crowns, a full gold crown. I’m sure most of you have a seen a full gold crown. It’s gold colored. Those we can do, if people request them. Some people still want us to use a full gold crown, and that’s fine, and we can do that as well. But our standard at our office now is the porcelain fused to zirconia or a full zirconia crown, because of the bio-compatibility.