By Dr. Carolina Benalal, DDS.
Is technology always good?
I have been a dentist since 1986. You can do the math. I’ve had and still have plenty of dentist friends, as you can imagine. Let me tell you. We are quite a “special” crowd.
Have you heard about neuroplasticity? Our brain can adapt to events on the outside; it happens mostly with repetitive events, actions, or responses. It is the same principle as AI, applied to neurons, so we could call it neural intelligence NI. As events happen, we react, and the connections
in our brains learn from those responses.
The level of stress a dentist has (and the whole team, for that matter), can be hard to imagine for someone outside the profession. It is related to multiple factors, which you can read about in a separate article in this blog, and the consequences are tremendous: to name one, suicide runs very high in the profession.
The consequences of that stress affect the dental market as a whole. The end-users in this market are 3.5 billion patients receiving dental treatment globally; be as it may, the main drivers of this global market are two million dentists, with their decisions and their behavior.
Willpower depletion is a critical factor in mental health. Applied to dentists, it is important to know it reaches levels where they turn away from decision-making that does not directly affect their patients. Then, if they are not directly making decisions that could influence technological advancements in dentistry, who does?
Big corporations are in the driver’s seat. They find strategies or paths to earning billions with technology that will not necessarily benefit the patient or the dentist, and they push it to market. If you looked at the products and the pains/problems they are supposed to solve, you would wonder how they ever make it.
I am here discussing the Cad-Cam evolution in the dental office. Cad-cam has existed in dental offices since 1986 with Cerec-Siemens. Then, all of a sudden a mass invasion of intra-oral scanners and CAM technology has happened. Why?
Initially, one unstoppable company decided on a change in their strategy and started the roller as it has done many times before. And that did it. Transforming the profession to benefit the corporation, not the patient.
Do patients benefit from it? No.
Is the quality of the prostheses built better? No -Dr. Christensen June 2021- Do dentists gain in quality of life? No.
Is there less stress in the dental office? No.
Is it easier to take a scan than a silicone impression? No!
Can the dentist charge more for this procedure? NO.
Is the dental office overhead increased? YES.
Is financial pressure on the dentist higher? YES.
Cad-Cam is a game-changer in dental labs, 100%. But scanning in dental offices is a nightmare for offices that do not need the added stress. Like so many other technological advancements, all those scanners will end up in the storage room. Yes, labs will be scanning stone models and using cad-cam to produce dental prostheses, which is their profession, not ours.
Why do I say this? Well, an intraoral scanner does not make the impression any simpler. The IOS (intraoral scanner) is way too big! The maximum size should be one of Oral-B toothbrushes.Saliva, blood, and gum remain the main obstacle to a good impression. Hence a dentist that does not
take good conventional impressions cannot take good IO scans!
The compressive effect the impression material can have on soft tissue does not exist with an IOS. Scanning six teeth perfectly well, takes way more time than the setting time of current materials! Companies selling the technology try to make dentists believe that the assistants can do this efficiently “just because it is a camera” Really?
In reality, IOS could make sense for small jobs in the dental office, and then for these, maybe that’s when the CAM finds its place, but of course, not when there is high aesthetic demand. Now being the quality, if I personally need a crown, I want a conventional impression, scanned by the lab and fully built by them, or even a conventional PFM crown.
One more detail about IOS: why are big dental lab corporations pushing dentists to use IOS if they know the quality is not better? Labs charge the same whether you send them an STL file or a silicone impression. In the first case, they have to pour it and scan it. In the second, the dentist does the work. (!!!!!) So a big lab corporation is saving millions a year in materials and manpower! Hum…
Some salespeople in the dental field are masters at selling us things we don’t need, which will take us hours of an unpaid learning curve and has no benefit for the end-user, the patient!
Yes, many dentists are money-driven, agreed. Still, as you dive deeper into all aspects of the dental market services, representing globally $435 billion, you can see the giant raptors looking at how they can take a chunk of that.
I always say there is nothing more complicated than selling to a dentist. But for a good salesperson, nothing is easier than selling to a willpower-depleted person.
And last but not least, as I review this article initially written in December 2021, here we are in 2023, with companies like Dandy showing up to dehumanize even more the dental Team. Just because the manufacturing process of a crown can be automated and machine-driven, I believe the figure of DLT should not be underestimated or disappear. These are not knee prostheses we are building or dental implants. Our lab technicians are building central incisors that should go unnoticed, which is called a work of art. No machine can replace the human eye and its exquisite perception of nuances nor the magnificence of a beautifully built ceramic stratification.
At The CrownID® Company we aim to empower the dental team and build simple willpowerreplenishing solutions that can help the team work better, which does help patients. Building solutions with the patient and the dentist in mind is the only way to grow vertically, helping others as we help ourselves. But transparency is key.