Crown Repair?

[Retire Soon]

Recently we relocated and I just went to a new dentist this week. After having my teeth cleaned, the dentist observed that I had a hole drilled in a porcelain crown which now had a silver filling in it (molar). This was something I was not aware of until then. I casually, responded, "I must have had a cavity there." The dental assistant blurted out in obvious surprise, "In a crown." I didn't know what to say at this point.

After leaving the dentist's office I went home and looked in the mirror. Sure enough, I noticed that I had a porcelain crown that had an obvious silver filling in the back of my mouth. At that point, I recalled that my previous dentist in San Diego had supposedly installed two new crowns in June. He had sent in for a pre-approval from my insurer, which had been granted. I even looked in my file cabinet and saw that my dentist had indeed billed my insurer for 2 crowns, at $900 a each. I remember clearly (now) that he had said one of my existing crowns had "leaked" and that the tooth under the crown had a cavity in it. This crown was defective and needed to be replaced. The one that had "leaked" was the one that this particular dentist had previously installed years ealier. Well, he experienced tremendous difficulty in his attempts to remove the crown, and was unable to remove it. A discussion took place between the dentist and the assistant about how they may have not followed the correct procedure in gluing the crown when the pair had installed it many years earlier. Then, they evidently drilled a hole through the crown and filled the cavity, but did not tell me about it. I had assumed that they had finally removed the old crown, and were drilling my tooth with the crown removed.

Has anyone else on this board had a hole drilled in a crown in order to fill a cavity or was it just my San Diego dentist who does these things?

[lazygood4nothinbum]

with what i've paid for crowns i would have screamed bloody murder if someone drilled through one.

bruxism also runs in my family. my little nephew almost wore his baby teeth down to the nerves. i grind but usually not so bad. but when i was dealing with all the stress of job, death & dieing, my grinding & clenching caused big time trouble. you could buy a bmw with what i've done to save my teeth (including regrowing bone.)

how important is good dental health? "Several theories exist to explain the link between periodontal disease and heart disease." http://tinyurl.com/ynhxxb

so when i was getting my bimonthly cleaning at the perio office, i said to the tech, our teeth need redesign. they shouldn't require this much maintenance. my dog went a complete lifetime with a full set of healthy teeth. i can pretty much keep the rest of my body healthy by diet alone. but even if i just survive on crunchy dog bones, mouth bacteria alone will destroy my teeth. if you don't believe me, just pick up any national geographic magazine.

so when i die, i'm not only going to complain about all the pain of life, i want a redesign of our teeth.

[cute fuzzy bunny]

My dad used to teach the fine art of pulling teeth at Tufts before retiring, so any specific questions...ask away.

For the OP, you want a new post and crown. Theres usually a mismatch between the old stuff and your gums as you age and its worse than that...theres usually a mismatch right off the bat as many dentists make impressions of your swollen gums instead of waiting a few weeks to take them when the gum tissue is back to normal. I forget the exact details of this but remember my dad mentioning it when I had a couple of crowns made a few years ago.

The links between periodontal disease and heart disease may not be correlative...many think that people who take better care of their teeth care more about their health, eat better and take better care of themselves.

The good news is theres a process being developed to completely regrow teeth. The bad news is that it'll be years before anything is remotely close to being productized and the worse news is that it requires wearing a power source and having some wires run from that into your mouth to stimulate the underlying bone of the jaw for 20 minutes a day, for four months.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/ult...teeth-news.htm

[Nords]

Quote:

Originally Posted by SonnyJim BTW Nords, some of the best dentistry I have seen has been done by Navy dentists (no, I am not a Navy dentist) and here is your evidence based dentistry link http://www.ada.org/prof/resources/po...dencebased.asp

Hey, thanks for the link. I didn't a dentist's version of EBM to actually exist!

I'm glad you had a good Navy dentist, because I was wondering if they were all as bad as the ones I've known. I spent most of my career telling them to get their hands off my wisdom teeth, because in the early days of the boomer patrols there was concern about having to MEDEVAC for impacted ones. By the time I joined the submarine force I was convinced that they were just trying to complete all the practical evolutions on their qualification cards.

We'd been underway one patrol for about eight days when the corpsman walked into the wardroom to discuss one of our sailors who'd had two wisdom teeth extracted the day before the departure. The CO asked "So, Doc, how's SN Schmuckatelli?"* The corpsman dropped a hunk of root about a half-inch long on the table and said "Sir, I got this out on my own but I think he's gonna be fine now..."

Maybe it's pejoratively offensive, but it's a typical submarine moniker for generic junior seamen. Officers are named "Ensign Schmeckel". Chief Petty Officers, of course, are referred to as "Chief Petty Officer" since there are no pejoratives in this rank...