Are gold dental crowns better than porcelain-fused-to-metal crowns?
Whether a choice of restorative material is better or worse depends on its suitability to the specific situation. In the U.S., most people wouldn’t think of having a gold crown in a position where it would be plainly visible. Being in New York, which has a substantial immigrant population, we have had several foreign-born patients request a gold crown be placed in a front tooth. It’s mostly a question of cultural concept of aesthetics. As a restorative material, many dentists favor gold. We suspect this has much to do with nostalgia for the “Days of the Giants”, as our professors in dental school were fond of saying. Gold is a soft, ductile metal which is chemically and biologically inert, and easy to cast and machine accurately. This was not the case with early base metal ceramic alloys, which were hard, brittle, and elicited allergic reactions due to their nickel content. These problems have been largely eliminated in modern porcelain fused to metal crowns. Although gold crowns can b
