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The future is here…

I remember watching Tomorrow’s World as a child on BBC with great excitement looking at the amazing things we were due to have in the future. Things like mobile phones and fridges that talked to each other…

Getting into dentistry I was excited by the potential for technology use but I was regularly disappointed by the lack of technology in use clinically. In college you processed an x-ray as they had in the year 1900 by going into a dark room and putting film into chemical tanks. Impressions were taken the same way they were in Victorian times using thick gloopy gels. Bites were taken with wax bites just like they would have been for hundreds of years. 

Then slowly technology started to creep into dentistry ever so slowly. Digital x-rays arrived and offered a lower dose to the patient and instant images, a huge breakthrough! Braces such as Invisalign came along which no longer required train tracks to improve your smile. 3D milling and scanning came along where a tooth could be imaged and then a crown made chairside in as little as 1 visit. 

The scanning was though a big disappointment. Getting good images was very hard. The camera would fog up in the mouth. You needed to spray a powder on the teeth so the camera could see them. The computers would crash constantly just as you had mastered the image and everything was lost. This would eventually mean that the scanners remained collecting dust in the cupboard and impressions were taken as they were a hundred years ago.

Then suddenly everything changed!

Finally the promise of the technology arrived and now we have a new digital scanner which works like magic! In just a few minutes it created a whole 3D image of your mouth showing all the teeth in 3D on a large screen. You can see what the dentist sees and more. If you have tooth wear you can be monitored over time and the scanners will show exactly how much wear is happening so it can be stopped in its tracks. When taking a bite the scanners take a 3d video and you can see the teeth moving on the screen!

Benefits for you as a patient

• Being able to see and understand what is happening in your mouth.
• Higher quality dentistry with better fitting crowns/veneers and bridges.
• Easier impressions with no need for impression trays in most cases.
• Being able to monitor in great detail progression of tooth wear/recession of gum and bite changes.
• Experiencing some really cool technology…
• Come join us at Seapoint where we will be introducing this for free on all new patients.