Quality impression materials will put you on the cutting edge and support your success
Featured Products Promotional FeaturesPosted by: Dental Design 12th December 2021
Of the many required elements for building a successful, thriving dental practice – including a talented team, efficient patient management and a reputation for delivering all-round excellence – are the materials you use.
Great practitioners need world-class materials to do their jobs; materials only reach their world-class potential when used by practitioners who are highly-skilled and know all the latest techniques. The best materials, when used correctly, enable smooth workflows and increase your chances of getting things right, first time. This is what patients expect; if they’ve received a crown, they assume it’s going to stay put and blend perfectly with the surrounding teeth, so they can get on with life without giving their restoration too much thought.
A great material needs universally good reviews
If your margins have been squeezed of late, the cost of materials and other supplies is one area you might be looking at, and you’ll want to see value demonstrated. Outcomes are what patients will judge you on, though, so high-quality products that support stable, strong as well as beautiful smiles should always be favoured, even if they cost you – and your patients – a little bit more.
A great material must be considered as such by everyone who works with it, not just the dentist. Your impression material is the best example of this; from the dental nurse who does the mixing, to the technician who doesn’t want to send anything back for a retake, there should be a general agreement that it is easy to handle and can be used to deliver predictable and precise results.
Think about your patients too. It is rare to find one who will not baulk at the sensation of impression material in their mouth, but you can choose one that makes the experience more tolerable. A material that is fast-setting, tastes pleasant and does not get left behind and stuck between the teeth will be better accepted, for example.
Always a place for tradition
Impression materials are fundamental to your success, both as a clinician and for the practice as a whole, so it’s worth taking the time to source the best. High-quality impressions are more in demand than ever before. Even if a “traditional” impression is going to be digitised, the scanner will need to see all the margins clearly in order to design the restoration accurately. In fact, although digital dentistry is becoming more mainstream, there will always be a need, particularly when working with complex cases, for a dentist to return to conventional methods of impression-taking. In these challenging situations, even if you have cutting-edge technologies at your disposal, you may decide that a tried-and-tested method for replicating dentition, in combination with your experience, skills and a high-quality impression material, will be the most efficient route to a reach successful outcome. Whatever field(s) you are in, you will need to have achieved mastery of dental impressions, including both the traditional and very latest techniques and be working with the kind of materials that give you a range of options so you can help as many patients as possible.
The evolution of modern materials
Modern impression materials have evolved massively since beeswax! With such a wide choice available, clinicians should know the properties and limitations of each, for successful treatment planning. There are important benchmarks in the historical timeline for impression materials; a recent one was the introduction of addition silicone (A-silicone) materials, which are now the most widely used. With no by-products, these offer superior flow, excellent replication of detail and good dimensional stability, meaning the impression will endure. A-silicone materials are particularly good for crown and bridge work, which is likely to constitute a large proportion of your practice’s daily treatments. COLTENE AFFINIS™ impression materials (which superseded its PRESIDENT™ line, the first A-silicone on the market) offer optimised flow, a non-drip formula, are fully autoclavable and come in stunning colours. Find your preferred combinations – the heavy body BLACK EDITION works well with AFFINIS™ PRECIOUS light body in silver or gold, to pick up the necessary detail for precision impressions any laboratory will be happy to receive. The materials are also favoured by dental nurses for their ease of workability, who report they are well-tolerated by patients.
Being caught up new launches in tools and technology, materials sometimes get forgotten. But modern material development is the result of ongoing research and development and backed by science – it’s cutting-edge and exciting. Even something as everyday as impression materials have evolved dramatically, alongside new techniques to use with them. Despite more digital dentistry, clinicians will always need conventional methods of impression-taking, particularly with challenge cases. Make sure the impression materials you are using are the best on the market – you’ll be giving your team quality to work with, and supporting an enduring outcome for every patient. Get your impression materials right, because they are crucial to your success.
Nicolas Coomber, COLTENE National Account & Marketing Manager
For more on COLTENE, visit www.coltene.com,
email info.uk@coltene.com or call 0800 254 5115.
