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.
