Cavity Bullet

The Key Reasons Why I Suggest You Avoid Dental Caps

Does it surprise you to hear a holistic dentist with more than 25 years experience tell you to avoid dental crowns and caps? After all, most dentists love to cap teeth. Capped teeth are believed by most to be the ultimate dental restoration. So how could a dentist be telling you to avoid caps and crowns?

For those who have crowned teeth, this sequence of events may sound familiar:

*Your tooth has a cavity

* Your tooth doctor repairs the hole with a filling … amalgam or composite

* Down the road the restoration fails or maybe the tooth breaks

* A cap (ceramic, metal or maybe ceramic fused to gold) will now be placed

* Many times the capping procedure is traumatic enough to cause the tooth nerve to expire

* Dead nerves cause pain an need to be treated by means of a root canal procedure or an extraction

The tooth nerve often dies as a consequence of the traumatic and aggressive crown procedure. To crown a tooth, the dentist must grind away all of the enamel and a significant amount of the dentin that makes up the inner tooth core. Studies have shown that as many as 15% of crowned teeth will experience complications serious enough to kill the tooth nerve. If you’re lucky enough to dodge the root canal / extraction bullet, you may think you’ve won the battle.

Even though caps are often called “permanent”, they don’t last forever. In fact, the average life-span for a crown is actually around 10 years. Almost all dental insurance companies will pay to replace a new cap when it fails after only 5 years. Most dental customers cannot understand how the crown can decay … how can something composed of porcelain or metal get a cavity? No one wants to fork out another large chunk of capital to re-fix the tooth that they believed had been restored in a permanent way.

When trying to explain why your tooth must be worked on again, your dentist may assert things such as: “nothing lasts forever” or “the oral cavity is a very hostile environment”. He / She may even pass the blame over to you by hinting that lousy oral cleanliness along with bacterial plaque along the gum-line caused the crown the fail. The only problem with this explanation is that assuming bad oral cleanliness were to blame, all of your teeth would be damaged by decay … not only this single capped tooth.

If you are a thinking person, the warning flags should be soaring about now … this story does not entirely seem sensible. The key reason crowns fail after some time is because of a critical engineering mistake. Caps are made of materials that happen to be quite rigid … porcelain, gold or porcelain fused to gold. Surprisingly, your teeth are actually very flexible. There’ re intended to bend at the gum line under biting forces.

Now for the exact reason you need a replacement crown. Each time you bite your teeth together, a battle occurs between your bendable tooth and the unbending cap. This will cause strain to occur and your gum-line that finally “pops the seal” between your tooth and the cap. The defective seal lets harmful bacteria to invade the open space underneath the crown and eventually a cavity develops. In dentistry we call this bacterial attack “crown leakage” … you will have a different way to describe it!

There is a small branch of dental technology named biomimetic dentistry that comprehends and deals with the problem of crown leakage. To start with, biomimetically trained dentists rarely if ever place crowns on your teeth. Next, they never place rigid, inflexible materials at the gum-line when restoring teeth. Simply by repairing teeth in ways that mimic nature, leaking crowns and “unexpected root canals” are generally avoided.

Biomimetic dental techniques are excellent alternatives to crowns, simulate the un-restored tooth under function, deliver long-lasting dental treatments and also significantly reduce the need for root canal treatment.

Curt Eastin DDS, ND is a holistic dentist and a naturopathic physician. He earned his doctorates at the University of Washington School of Dentistry and the National College of Naturopathic Medicine. His dental website is a rich resource for holistic dentistry.

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