Repairing a Chipped Tooth to Prevent a Cavity

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The tooth enamel that covers your teeth is comprised of microscopic crystals that are densely packed to provide the necessary strength to bite and grind your foods. Despite the durability of the enamel is, habits such as grinding your teeth and chewing pencils or receiving a hard blow to the face can create a chip in the tooth enamel. If you have a chipped tooth, we may need to place a dental crown to protect it from a cavity.

Most dental chips are minor and won’t cause pain, causing patients to believe they can ignore the injury, especially if it isn’t very visible. We encourage you to address the tooth damage so that food particles and plaque don’t accumulate in the chipped area and result in the development of tooth decay.

If the chip is minor, it may be able to be repaired with a basic dental filling, but if it is significant or or is located on a vulnerable area of the tooth, our dentist may recommend that you choose a dental crown instead.

Custom-made dental crowns mimic the external structure of the tooth and are commonly created with materials such as porcelain, gold or base metal alloys. We design the crown to be hollow so that it can cover an abutment created out of the remaining structure of the tooth.

After we clear away the tooth enamel, we create a detailed impression of the abutment and surrounding bite pattern to ensure your permanent dental crown is a good fit for your smile. We then send the impression to a dental lab to have the dental restoration custom made, and a temporary crown covers and protects the abutment while we wait.

At your follow-up appointment, we remove the temporary crown and cement the new crown securely into place. We encourage you to contact First Dental of Bluffton at 843-757-2828 today if you have suffered a chipped tooth and would like to speak with our dentists, Drs. Hobart, Yu and Ulbrich, about receiving a dental crown in Bluffton, South Carolina.