Dental Technology

[ffutures]

I went to the dentist yesterday, after a large part of one of my teeth broke off. The tooth had previously had root canal work so there was no pain, but it was pretty much ruined, and obviously had to be filled and replaced.

Given the size I was expecting them to take impressions and make a crown, and have to go back in a couple of weeks to get it fixed, but it turns out that's not the way they do things any more.

The procedure went roughly as follows - I'm undoubtedly misunderstanding or missing some parts of the process that weren't obvious to me in the chair:

1. Clean out cavity with the usual drill burr thing.
2. Spray interior of cavity with some sort of sealant gunk.
3. Harden it with UV light for a few seconds.
4. Insert a probe into the cavity (not sure what it was, I think a teeny camera but it might have been sonar) and waggle it around a little.
5. Show me a 3D image of the hole on a computer screen and explain that it's going to have to be filled with a ceramic plug. Naturally I asked how long it would take for the plug to be made - answer, it's a CAD-CAM process, they do it in the surgery with some sort of milling machine, and I should go and sit in the waiting room for 15 minutes.
   
6. 15 minutes later, I go back upstairs, he pops some glue into the cavity, inserts the plug, has me bite a few times to get it bedded in, checks that it isn't sticking up too much, and grinds off a couple of places where it's a little too high.

And that was it. Total time from arriving at the surgery to getting out of the chair about 30 minutes, and the whole thing done in one appointment, not two or three. Colour me impressed...

Comments

[pengshui-master.livejournal.com]

That's the coolest high street application of rapid prototyping tech I've seen/(heard of).

There is - presumably a dying - trade in making those sort of dental implants using effectively model makers techniques, or clinical versions thereof. But if the kit for what you had done becomes common place I can see it dying out - rather fast.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It may not be practical for everything, of course - I have no idea what the limitations are. The machine that did it seemed to be about the size of a large laser printer.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

And what I forgot to say is that this is a small practice, with only 1 or 2 dentists at any given time, and a lot of the patients NHS. The bigger practices are presumably able to afford even more impressive tech.

[dandello.livejournal.com]

I'm in the US - my first crown took two weeks and three visits to get it right and was gold (bad prior dentist and really bad amalgam). My latest one took one visit, matches my tooth color, is glued to the dentine and will outlast me. (And the machine really does look like a large laser printer.) The crowns are cure by UV just like your plug.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've had a crown made that way - both are considerable improvements over the way things used to be done.

[eledonecirrhosa.livejournal.com]

Wow! I break teeth all the time (I grind my teeth when I'm asleep*). I wish my repair work had been that fast and that painless. Crowns and temporary fillings all over the place.


*I now have wear facets on my front teeth from using a mouth guard, but I suppose that's better than constantly breaking molars...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I was lucky I'd had root canal work on that tooth previously, so it was pretty much painless, didn't even need anaesthetic.