Digital impressions

We still see so many patients who attend our clinic for the first time and recall a bad dental experience they have had in the past. One experience recalled by so many patients involves the dental impression appointment.

This is traditionally the appointment whereby the patient requires a dental crown, implant crown, veneer, mouthguard, whitening tray, orthodontic treatment or anything else that require a dental impression. In fact, so many treatments, almost all of them nowadays require a dental impression. It is the only way we can get the relevant information to the dental technicians to complete your treatment.

This impression has often been a slurry of dental paste that is placed into your mouth loaded onto a bulky tray. The slurry takes a few minutes to set into a rubberry solid material – capturing the shape of your mouth and all the precise groooves and irregularities bespoke to you. However, during this setting phase, the slurry can often trickle down the back of your throat making you gag. It can be a very uncomfortable experience, especially if you have to repeatedly go through it due to your dental treatment requirements. It has actually put many people off going to the dentist altogether – it really has been reported as being that much of a negative experience by patients that I have spoken with myself.

At Infinity Dental Clinic we use digital impressions using an intra oral scanner. This means we don’t need to put a slurry of gag inducing material in our patient’s mouth. We can simply use a small intra oral camera to take thousands of pictures within a minute to then piece together a 3-d image of your mouth. For anyone who is familiar with digital technology, our equipment produces a working STL file of your mouth in real time to enable use to 3-d print, design and mill your dental prostheses without ever having to place uncomfrotable dental pastes into your mouth.

Digital impressions is somehting we have been using at Infinity Dental Clinic for over 8 years however, I still find so many patients are unaware of this.

I write this blog in the hope to reach out to those who may have been put off dentistry due to this – we can help you by using modern technology in our every day clinics.

Thank you for reading,

Mohsin Patel