Macomb County Dentist Explains the Importance of Planning for Cosmetic Dentistry
Hi, this is Doctor Antolak from thegentledentist.com in Shelby Township, Michigan, and what I’m holding here is a model, a diagnostic model of one of our patients. I do quite a bit of cosmetic dentistry, as you can see from our website, and we’ve actually been able to help a lot of people with their smile and improving it.
What I want to do is to show you on a detail of what we do before we start procedures which are more complex. As we take impressions of the mouth, that’s that kind of that gooey stuff that can go in the mouth, it captures a negative image of that. Then we take that and we pour that up in plaster.
This is a plaster model here, as you can see. These are made out plaster and it’s an exact duplicate of this patient’s mouth and what their teeth look like. What it does is, this is called an articulator. An articulator duplicates what it would be like in the jaw. So this shows the jaw joint here. If we need to move the teeth around so we can diagnose what the person’s problem is, then we can move the jaw in different directions. I can see forward and backward like this. We can move it from side to side. We can open and close it. What this does is allows us to look and see where the teeth are lined up and what potential problems they might have and it gives us an ability to have what’s called a working model. Something like this. We can do some prototype work so that when that patient comes into that room, we are ready to treat them and do their smile or implants, for example, because we have done it already and the details are worked out in the plan before anything is really done.
What’s important about that?
It’s so important to start with the end in mind. You have to start knowing what your result is going to be. So that you know what the next step is. I’ve had patients of mine that come to me and say they had this done and this done, and then they had had something redone because it wasn’t planned out properly. So what we do at our office is, we take plenty of information, you know we want to interview our patients, so that we will know what their desires are.
We don’t assume anything and so after we get done interviewing, we take photos, a lot of high definition photographs, so that we can see what their teeth look like. The position of the lip, the way the lip looks when they’re lips are at rest and relaxed, when they’re smiling, from either side. We take pictures of the jaws from the top or the bottom and what that does is it gives us a really great ability to see as if that patient was actually in the chair. Sometimes, we can even do more information once we have models like this, photographs and x-rays, to plan for the best result possible.
Once again, you have to start with the end in mind and that end is dictated by you, the patient,, who will tell us what you want for yourself, the way you want things to look.
Macomb County Dentist Explains the Importance of Planning for Cosmetic Dentistry
So, if this is the detail that you like and that interests you and if you want a dentist to sit and listen to you what your needs are and listen to what your concerns are, then please give us a call. Our phone number is 586-247-3500, or visit us at thegentledentist.com. Thank you. Have a great day.