Crowns vs. Onlays Explained by Shelby Township Dentist
Hi I’m Dr. Heather Pranzarone Stratton a dentist in Shelby Township, Michigan and I wanted to talk a little bit today about the difference between onlays and crowns. We also get a lot of questions about the difference between what’s an onlay and what’s a crown. We really believe at the office to conserve as much of your healthy tooth structure as we can. We have a conservative approach in dentistry and so, that means that when you come in, if you have a cavity, we want to remove as little of the tooth structures. We can preserve as much of the tooth structures we can, so you can keep those teeth for the rest of your life. So, because of that, what we do sometimes in our Shelby Township office is something called an onlay, or an inlay, and what that is specifically is, it’s like a half of a crown, it’s like a portion of a crown. And so with a crown, if any of you have had crowns before, what a crown is, is we have to take down the whole outside of the tooth structure, the perimeter of the tooth. And that way the laboratory can make some porcelain that goes around the tooth, and we can make your tooth structure as it was to begin with when it was nice and healthy.
So what an onlay is, is we’re just removing the “not good” portion of your tooth, the decayed portion or the cracked portion of your tooth and replacing that with porcelain.
So we’re able to keep a lot more of that good tooth structure. There are studies that have shown that once you have a crown on your tooth, maybe 3 or 4 times, that’s probably all that we’re going to be able to do with that tooth before there’s too little tooth structure left that we can’t keep it any more. So the more conservative we are in preparing the tooth for a restoration, if it needs one, that would be the thing to do, would maybe, be doing an onlay.
So then people ask, why don’t you just do a filling in a tooth. Well, we do mostly fillings here. We don’t usually do a lot of onlays or crowns. We do a lot of fillings. But sometimes maybe half the tooth is gone and if half the tooth is gone, it might be too much just to put a filling in the tooth to repair it to it’s nice normal healthy tooth structure. But I always tell all of my patients, ultimately, they’re your teeth. I could tell you what I see in your mouth and I could tell you what’s best for you and how that’s going to improve your overall health and your oral health, but ultimately it’s your teeth. And so you get to make that final decision. But that’s the main difference between an on-lay and a crown. And a filing.
Crowns vs. Onlays Explained by Shelby Township Dentist
If you have any other questions regarding crowns and onlays in Shelby Township, please give us a call at 248-652-0024.
