Dental Info

 Last week in our study club, we watched an excellent presentation by Frank Spear on restoring short teeth. Since there are many different reasons that teeth appear short, there are a number of different way to make them look better. Some of the reasons for a person having short teeth include altered active and altered passive eruption , Tooth size-arch discrepancy , or excessive wear. The solutions to fixing the appearance is varied and dependent on why the teeth are short, the position in the face of the short teeth and how the teeth should appear after they are restored.  Worn teeth tend to experience compensatory eruption and to fix them , we have to be aware of where their  edges should be when the restoration is completed. These teeth should not be lengthened with out consideration of other factors. Optimum restorative solution can vary but include orthodontic intrusion, crown lengthening, and/ or bite opening.  For a dentist to make a appropriate trea...

 Patient education and follow ups really are often needed to make sure recommended changes are followed through by our patients are not really properly reimbursed by patients or their health insurance. Coaching a patient either by a dentist or one of their staff actually can requires more than one appointment in order to assure that the patient has properly implemented home care properly.  Given the way things in healthcare is moving, patients are expecting lower out of pocket costs and desire  treatment covered by their dental insurance. Unfortunately most dental insurances efforts seem focused on saving their companies money by cost containment and rejecting payments for submitted expenses that they deem 'unnecessary' . Maybe I'm exaggerating but possibly they don't seem that concerned with patients keeping their teeth for a life time. I believe their ultimate goal is to maximize their own profits during the short term, especially since many patients do not maintain ...