This week's clinical tip, courtesy of CDOCS, focuses on ensuring the best results for your dental patients' anterior teeth.
Video transcript
"Hi, this is Mike Skramstad of CDOCS.com, and welcome to the tip of the day.
"Now, in this case, I'd like to talk about correctly preparing anterior teeth. Now this is a full-mouth reconstruction, but we're only going to concentrate on the upper anterior teeth.
"Now for many of us, the workflow is going to be sending this to a lab to get a digital diagnostic wax-up. So I'll scan the upper, I'll scan the lower, I'll scan the bite, and I'll send off her diagnostic wax-up.
"Now, when we get this back oftentimes, we're in such a hurry to transfer this to the mouth that we forget, how do you know that this transferred to the mouth accurately? Now, just transferring the diagnostic wax-up in acrylic on top of the pre-op teeth is an effective way just to show the patient the new shape of the teeth.
"But you have to be careful, because you probably didn't transfer this accurately. So you're generally not going to want to do your depth cuts directly into this when you're starting your appointment.
"The reason is, is if we look at the diagnostic wax-up, you can see that there's some parts that are additive and some parts that are not. So it goes to reason that if you just simply transfer this acrylic on top of the teeth and then do your depth cuts, that you're not going to correctly reduce the teeth.
"So a very effective way to guarantee that you're accurately transferring the wax-up to the mouth is to go ahead and pre-prep the teeth first. So here, I'm going to quickly just pre-prep the teeth, knowing I'm reducing enough to then correctly get this diagnostic wax-up to seat in the mouth. Now based on this, I can now do my depth cuts correctly and finalize the preparations on the upper anterior teeth.
"So you have to remember that if you don't correctly seat the wax-ups, then your depth cuts are not going to be correct. If your depth cuts are not going to be correct, you're just going to get further and further in trouble along on your case.
"So hopefully this helped, and for more tips like this, please visit us at CDOCS.com. Thanks."
