The difference between a dental crown and a dental filling is a filling we do on a tooth when we know we can preserve still a lot of the tooth compared to how much material we need to apply to the tooth. Meaning when a cavity is small then we can easily remove that cavity, put a nice cosmetic resin white filling in there and ensure that the patient can go home comfortable and confident that they can bite down on that tooth without worrying about breaking the tooth. At some point when we are drilling a cavity out because it’s so big and I don’t mean so deep into the tooth but how much surface area it’s going to take up of the tooth.
At that point we have to make an educated decision with the patient and say hey putting a filling on here puts us at risk that the tooth may break if you bite down hard enough. Specifically our back teeth are meant to be used for chewing. We clench and grind on our back teeth so we don’t want to compromise the tooth with a big filling only to have a patient go home and months later come back with a broken tooth and at that point it might be too late to do a crown.
A crown is basically a blanket, a cover, a cap that covers the tooth after we’ve cleaned out the cavity and built the tooth back up to give the patient the confidence to bite down on a tooth without worrying about it breaking.
