At Aesthetic Dental Care of New Jersey it’s extremely critical for us to stay current because things have changed so much over the past few years that if you don’t stay current you get left behind. And the techniques that we have today and the materials that we have today are far better than what we used even 5 or 10 years ago. So staying current really is the most important thing for us here.
We stay current by taking a lot of continuing education courses. We take them at LVI which is the premiere leading postured center for education in the country. We take courses all over actually and we maintain the cutting edge by getting this technology in and by using it and learning how to use it and getting proficient at it.
We now have a CEREC machine which allows us to go ahead and make a crown or make an inlay on the same day of service as we’re going ahead and preparing the teeth. So that reduces the number of visits, that reduces putting temporaries in. People have temporaries in they frequently call and well, I lost one or it fell out. Here we go ahead and we can repair the tooth and we can go ahead and make the crown or the porcelain on lay right away and cement it or bond it in that same day. Very helpful for the sedation patients and we want to do as much work as possible in as little time and we want to go ahead and limit the number of visits. Or from people that come from out of town, from out of the area, who don’t want to make so many trips, we can go ahead and prepare the teeth, we don’t have to send it to the laboratory, we can do it right here and we can get it done and inserted the same day.
CEREC is a great tool for us because it allows us to go ahead and take a virtual impression of a tooth that we’re preparing for, for example, a crown or for an onlay, and instead of some people being very fearful of the impression that they’re going to go ahead and swallow the material or gag on it this is a camera that allows us to take a virtual impression, and from that virtual impression we can design the porcelain and then send it to the milling machine at the end of the hallway and it’s all prepared, all done at the same time in our office right here in Fairfield. So there’s no second visit, there’s no coming back two weeks later having more anesthetic put in, taking the temporary off and putting the crown in. It’s all done in one visit and again very beneficial for those having sedation because we can accomplish much more in fewer visits.
Multiple advantages for the digital radiography, first of all it reduces the amount of exposure by up to 90% which is very beneficial to the patient. It allows us to put up the X rays on the screen so that both the patient and I can take a look at the same time. We can go ahead and enhance, we can zoom in on those. We can go ahead and make enlargements of them, we can print them out. And the beauty of it is that they’re never lost. Sometimes conventional X rays are dropped and at the end of the day somebody finds one and can’t figure out who it belongs to. These are all computerized, they’re in the patient’s folder, and they can’t be lost, they can always be drawn up, and in a minute they can be duplicated. For the patient the benefit is the reduction in radiation.
We have many lasers that we use with different wavelengths. I started using a CO2 laser about 16 or 17 years ago and that has value to us in terms of laser being a bit more efficient than using a scalpel blade. It allows us to get a quicker healing time, a nicer healing phase. It allows us to do things with a laser that normally we wouldn’t be able to do without, and it just has multiple uses within periodontal treatment, with biopsy treatments. There’s many uses and we have different lasers for different uses.
We use laser aesthetic dental care for some gum treatments, we use it for gum surgery, we can use it for biopsies, we can use it for sculpting tissues which we do sometimes when we’re doing smile makeovers. So there are a lot of different uses that we have fro the various lasers that we have here. I find that the healing time is faster, I find that there’s very little bleeding when we use the laser as it cauterizes. I find that there’s much less post operative pain and complication. When we do procedures like fronectomies, there’s no longer the need to put stitches in so that you’re not losing stitches or having them get infected and it just is a much nicer way of doing the conventional surgical approach.
