Benefits of Same Day Dental Treatments

With any type of dental restoration comes a significant amount of commitment, both to the treatment, and to the amount of time it takes to properly administer that treatment. Same-day dentistry seeks to alleviate that burden by wasting very little of the patient’s time and streamlining the process as much as possible.

Whitening, bonding, and all types of professional cleaning can technically be categorized as same-day procedures. With many other types of more complex cosmetic dental treatment comes a significant planning period, usually an interval of time between consultation and operation reserved for a dental lab to take your impressions and turn them into your eventual crown, bridge, veneers, or dental implant. This is to ensure a snug, customized fit for each patient which would be completely impossible if the only option was to pull from one or several pre-determined models. Every mouth is different, and the back and forth does pay off in the long run. In more urgent cases where time is limited, however, that extra time is not always available.

There are many tools at our disposal that can help expedite your treatment. Contemporary scanning technology allows our dentists to learn more about your mouth on the day of your initial appointment than ever before. After gathering the necessary information, specs, and measurements about the tooth or teeth, that information will be used to build a digital model of the restorative fixture to be received by the patient, in some cases without even needing to go through the trouble of taking a physical impression. At that point, it’s simply a matter of feeding that information into a specialized 3D printer where your new implant, veneer, or crown will be created on-site and in under an hour.

With this alternative way of planning and performing the procedure, the patient spends less time in the chair and is exposed to anesthesia and local numbing agents the fewest times possible. It also enables our dentist to make choices that enable them to be as precise as possible, often allowing them to remove much less of the original tooth than would otherwise be acceptable using traditional means of restoration alone.

Most patients assume intuitively that the more time goes into the process, the better the results will turn out. This is not necessarily the case; keeping every step of the process so close to home will ensure that our San Francisco dentist has as much control over the outcome as possible. Eliminating that intermediary step between lab and office not only saves you an extraordinary amount of time, but also minimizes the opportunity for accidental mix-ups between patients and clerical errors.