Prosthetic Dentistry in Dubai

Prosthetic dentistry restores what a tooth has lost and replaces teeth that are gone. It covers the whole range from a single inlay to a full arch: veneers and smile design, crowns, bridges and dentures, restorations on implants, and the digital laboratory that makes all of it.

Two questions decide every case, and they are worth separating. The first is structural: how much sound tooth remains, and will a filling hold or does the tooth need covering. The second is optical: how the restoration will look next to the teeth beside it, in the light the patient actually lives in. Clinics that are good at the first and careless about the second produce work that lasts and looks wrong. Clinics that are good at the second and careless about the first produce work that looks beautiful for two years.

Both are engineering problems with measurable answers, and both are solved before anything irreversible is done to a tooth.

Most clinics in Dubai send their prosthetic work to an external laboratory. The technician who builds the crown never sees the patient, shade travels as a code written on a form, and a correction means a courier, an outside schedule and another appointment a week later.

ELEMENTAL has its own digital dental laboratory on site. The preparation is captured with an intraoral scanner rather than a tray of impression material, so the distortion that occurs when an impression sets, is transported and is poured never enters the chain. The design is built in CAD against the recorded bite. Milling and finishing happen in the same building, and the technician can look at your own teeth in daylight when the shade is decided.

The quieter benefit is feedback. A technician who is part of the clinic sees the cases come back for review years later — which margins held, which contacts opened, which shades aged well. An external laboratory almost never gets that information, and it is what improves the work over time.

For anything involving the front teeth, the design comes before the drill. Photographs, an intraoral scan and, where facial proportion matters, a three-dimensional facial photograph taken on the clinic's Planmeca ProFace module are used to design the shape, length, width and midline of the new teeth against your face rather than against a template.

That design is then transferred into the mouth as a temporary trial smile bonded over unprepared teeth. You can look at it, photograph it, speak with it and show it to the people whose opinion you care about. Everything that needs changing — too long, too square, too light, a midline that reads wrong on camera — is changed at that stage, when changing it costs nothing but time.

Only once the trial is agreed are teeth prepared, and the preparation is guided by the approved design so that no more tooth is removed than the design requires. Preparation and bonding are carried out under a dental operating microscope, because a veneer margin sits within a fraction of a millimetre of the gum and at that scale the difference between a margin a patient can clean and one that collects plaque is invisible to the naked eye.

Preparing a healthy, unrestored tooth for a veneer removes enamel that does not grow back, and from that point the tooth needs a covering for life. That is a reasonable trade for a tooth already chipped, worn, discoloured or heavily filled. It is a poor trade for a sound tooth whose only fault is being a shade darker than its neighbour, and we will say so.

Where teeth are in the wrong position rather than the wrong shape, the honest answer is orthodontics first, then restorations if they are still wanted — on teeth that no longer need grinding down to fake a position. Where the problem is colour alone, the answer is often whitening and nothing else.

And no prosthetic work is planned on unstable foundations. Gum health decides how a margin looks in three years, so gum treatment comes first where it is needed, and untreated decay or an unresolved root problem is dealt with before anything is made in the laboratory.

Zirconia is used where strength decides: molars, longer spans, heavy or grinding bites. Lithium disilicate and other glass ceramics reproduce the depth and light behaviour of enamel more convincingly and are the usual choice for front teeth. Composite is used where a conservative, repairable and less expensive answer is right. Cast metal frameworks are used for partial dentures where rigidity and thin section matter. There is no universally best material; there is a right one for the position, the load, the space available and how the restoration will be cleaned.

Published ranges for well-made porcelain veneers are commonly ten to fifteen years and for crowns ten to fifteen and longer, with composite shorter. Those are ranges, not promises: outcomes depend on the bite, on grinding, on gum health and on whether the margins are cleaned daily. Individual results vary, and a night guard is part of the plan wherever grinding is present.

A consultation starts from AED 650. Restorative work is quoted in writing after the examination with the stages listed separately — design and records, trial smile, preparation and temporaries, the definitive restoration, night guard where indicated — so the figure can be compared like for like with any other quotation you hold.

Crowns and porcelain veneers at ELEMENTAL start from AED 5,500 per tooth. Bridges and dentures are quoted by the number of units and the materials chosen. The final cost is confirmed in writing after your examination, before anything is scheduled.