The Four Ps in Pediatric Dentistry — Transcript
[00:00:12] Welcome, and why the four Ps
Hello everybody. Well, I know it is supposed to be in Vegas, our wonderful event, but we get to see each other here online. I’m Dr. Ataii, and I’m going to be talking to you about the four Ps in pediatric dentistry.
I’ll tell you, the reason why I picked these four Ps is a dear reason to me, because I have two kids, and these two kids of mine are in that age from eight to 11 years old. I don’t think they’re going to make it to 12. I’m not sure. So we’re going to talk a little bit about the pre-treatment, a little bit about photography, a little bit about prevention, and most importantly, about the parents. It’s important for us to understand that during these times, we have to have an actual plan.
Again, I’m Dr. Ataii, and those of you who saw me last year at the San Diego event may know I speak on clear aligners, on pediatric and early-stage orthodontics, as well as the airway situation with some of the kids. Our main goal has always been talking to parents about the kids that are growing. During that oral maxillofacial development, it’s important for us to understand that the tools we use in our practice, and getting those patients’ trust, which is the parents, is key, because a lot of times when we’re seeing these kids, we see them when it’s maybe a little too late.
Now, in my case, I have these two that I mentioned, and just to be safe, we’re going to have to mask everybody up. So let’s go ahead and get started.
[00:02:08] Standard of care versus staying profitable
The delicate balance, right? How do we continue the idea of standard of care and remaining profitable? We deal with this all the time. It’s a delicate balance. They go hand in hand. When we start talking about standard of care and what it means, especially in today’s climate, we have to understand that we still have to remain profitable. And at what point do we have to make decisions for these wonderful children in our practices?
For me, as a general dentist, I tend to send them to you as the pediatric patients. And it’s important because increasing and growing the practice has always been my mindset. But it’s hard, right? Because you have to always continue to get new patients. And how does that work? How do we get the new patients when we ourselves, right now, given today’s climate, have some challenges? Shutdowns happening. Essentials, true, but at what point do we do the cleaning? Do we do the basic cleaning, or what are we doing? Are we doing the extractions? Are we treating just in pain?
When I was in business school prior to dental school, the four Ps always stood for a business and a business model: you have to have the right product, you have to promote it properly, have a place where you’re going to conduct that business, and the right pricing. Those four Ps are what’s going to give you the next level up. For me, I think we have to talk about that in our daily practice as the pre-treatment, photography, prevention, and the parents. So let’s get right into it.
[00:04:01] Pre-treatment starts before the patient arrives
What does pre-treatment mean to you? Pre-treatment could be patients coming in and you’re showing a poster about oral hygiene tips. It could be maybe you have an app of some sort that you’re showing these patients’ parents of how to brush their teeth, or a model. The reality is, when the patient comes in, what we’re really seeing is at what point, when, where, and how are we going to be talking about pre-treatment?
For instance, when we see kids coming in, in the top photo, good Lord, how do you pre-treat that? And most importantly, how do we talk about prevention? There’s been something wrong in that family where this kid has been neglected in being seen by the doctor. So the reality of what happens is, I think pre-treatment starts prior to patients’ arrival.
Let me give you an example. When COVID happened and there was the initial shutdown, we quickly started to think about how do we educate our patients? Remember, this is back in early March, and for us, it was difficult. Do we talk about patients doing a webcam? Do we talk to them about their teeth? Are we available? Do we see emergencies? At that time, it was the unknown.
So what we quickly did was ramp up the patient education: that we put in an air filtration system, and the monthly service where they come out and clean our filters in our HVAC system to keep everybody safe. We partnered with a company that helped us do this, and the shutdown was hard because we needed communication tools.
A company called 4Smile talked to us about having an intraoral camera, just a simple little intraoral camera that they would send in a box to the household. This is a very inexpensive tool that we would give to our patients who wanted to talk to us. We would do a quick little web chat, and the parents were so delighted. There’s one for pediatric, there’s one for adult, and now the kids and the parents are talking to us about what they need to have done, if it was a broken tooth or they’re having pain.
This also created a buzz within the community of patients and their friends, who now want to come in because they get this little box. It’s much better than giving a toothbrush or toothpaste. But remember, I haven’t seen them yet. We just sent them this little intraoral kit, inexpensively, and now we have a communication tool.
They also put together a customized app that the patients would download, and just as we have patients fill out forms, there would be forms and information, and quickly we would have that communication tool. It was very responsive for the team in my office, and we are constantly communicating with our patients. Now this is our basis for pre-treatment. They would show us a quick little photo of their tooth or where they’re having pain. We then schedule them, and we’ve become a lot more efficient. That’s what’s really been happening.
[00:07:29] Why photography, not just the intraoral camera
Because when you start to talk about photography, about taking photographs, that’s a cumbersome conversation for teammates, right? It’s either too heavy, too bulky, and why are we taking photographs? The idea of photographs is not new. If you go back to the old days: you can’t treat what you can’t see, right?
But the reality is that in today’s dental office, we’ve honed in on intraoral cameras only. That has its limitations. It’s giving us a view where the patient has to understand what a plaque is. Okay, great, we show them that. But I want to give them a general view. I want something that gives them a much better scope. I want more of a treatment planning tool. And you start talking about chart documentation, reducing liability, and the self-evaluation of patients. All of these are based on photography.
It’s important because patients come to understand, every time they come in, why they’re getting a photo, because it’s a digital image, right? Would you rather take an X-ray or a photo? Sometimes an X-ray is needed, 100%. But there are times that a simple photo will give me a lot more communication tools and an understanding of where that patient’s headed in their recall visits.
[00:09:19] Team pushback on cameras
So what we’ve been talking about is the dental team pushback, right? When I started talking about implementing photography, it was very difficult, because my entire team would say, “There’s absolutely no way we’re going to take this big old SLR camera and take photos.” Too heavy, too many numbers to remember. “I don’t even know which one’s the intraoral and which one’s the face.” So we had a lot of pushback, and I’ve tried a lot of cameras in my time.
The reality is that trying to remember all those settings can be challenging. Just the aperture. There are classes on photography, right? But it can’t be that difficult. It cannot be that difficult. How do we make this easy, so you can see? Because think about it. The patient’s standing or sitting, and you’re trying to focus the lens. Oh my goodness. It’s very, very difficult, right? Is it on the F4 setting? Is it an F8 setting? So we’ve always had a conversation with our team about the ideal way of getting the images we want.
The big cameras have their advantages. They’re great for weddings, in my opinion. Their disadvantages: they’re heavy, they’re very expensive. Think about it. A camera and a setup with the light in the background, and I’ve seen doctors spend up to $10,000 on just photography and a room to have photos taken. So I decided to get those small little cameras. They’re lightweight. They’re small in cost. Guess what? The resolution’s not as good. I can’t email the image if I need to talk to my patients. It looks pixelated.
[00:11:19] The EyeSpecial camera
So I ran into a company called Shofu, and they talked to me about a camera, because I was in desperate mode. At that time, the EyeSpecial digital camera that Shofu had launched was very new to me. I didn’t know there’s such a thing where you can have a built-in flash, in and out. What does that mean? It has an outside flash, and it also has these little flash hits where you don’t get any of that black corridors.
And when you take a photo, it actually flips the image. So if you’re taking a maxillary photo, remember, those SLR cameras don’t flip the image. So sometimes the molar on the right side of the image is the reflection, which is on the left.
We’ve been able to integrate the EyeSpecial camera seamlessly in our practice as a video tool, as a camera, and most importantly, it already has the preset shots. It’s made for the dental office. It’s got nine preset shooting modes, from the facial view to the side view. It’s touchscreen, very lightweight, and most importantly, it’s water-resistant and you can clean it. It’s waterproof.
I’ll tell you why I say this: we’re always wiping everything down now, right? Have you ever wiped a regular screen with CaviCide and seen what it does to that screen? This camera’s made for that. You can have CaviCide wipes all day, all night over it, patient after patient, and it does not smear or take away the lens quality. And it’s got Wi-Fi capacity, so if you want to take a photo and quickly put it up on the screen in the operatory, it can do that for you.
The EyeSpecial has a couple of tools that are very important to me. As I said, I like the internal flash and the outside flash, which doesn’t give me that dark spotting in the actual corridors of the jaw. We’re able to use this on all patients, and we can simply shoot it. When it turns green on the LCD touchscreen, boom, it quickly takes it.
There are multiple modes: the standard mode if you want to do intraoral photography, and surgery mode if you want consistent surgical photography, which is always different because of the flash; it presets it. It has the mirror mode, as I mentioned, which uses the mirror image so you don’t flip it by accident; it does it by itself whether you’re taking the right side or the left side. And the face mode, for shooting facial views and portraits.
So it’s made it very easy to have this in our practice. We use it for marketing, for whitening before and afters. If you want to pick a shade and have a customized shade, that’ll help as well. For me, as a general practitioner, it’s my right arm. I have it in almost every operatory, and I’m able to use the different shooting modes and that grid that goes green. It’s always in focus for me. So if photography has importance to you, or someone in your practice has been complaining that regular cameras are too heavy, the EyeSpecial is an option, because photography is the key to increased production and patient education.
[00:15:33] How we take the photos (video demo)
So let’s talk a little bit about how to take these photos, because sometimes it takes some of the team members a lot of time. I thought I should show you how we do it in our practice real quickly, because last time a few of you saw the video and wanted to see it again. Give me one second.
Video (photo demo): All right, Nadia, we’re going to take some pictures, okay? I’m going to have you stand right against the wall. For the first shot, you’re just going to look straight into the camera. Do not smile. One, two, three. Now go ahead and smile. One, two, and three. Turn to the side. Look straight ahead. No smiling. One, two, three. Perfect. Go ahead and have a seat.
Now we’re going to take some pictures of your teeth. Put your head back all the way. Open. And hold onto these from the side. Bite down all the way. Perfect. Stay just like that. One, two, three. One, two, three. And open a little bit. Perfect. One, two, three. Bite down all the way. Bring this one to the middle, and I’ll hold onto this. One, two, three. Perfect. Hold onto this. Turn towards me. Bite down all the way.
Perfect. Now we’re going to take some of your top teeth. For this, if you could breathe through your nose, that would be great. Open big. Open a little more. Perfect. And roll it down to the bottom. Open big. One, two, three. Okay, perfect.
[00:18:10] Alternating photos and X-rays at recall
So let me bring you back to my slides here. As you can see, ideally, the idea of having a prevention program. Sorry, let’s see what happened here. […] I think I got it now. Bear with me. Okay, I think we’re back.
The idea is to have a program in place where every one of your patients is being seen by your hygienist or your dental team, and typically patients come in once every six months. For me, taking X-rays every six months is a little bit too much, right? I don’t need to take an X-ray every six months. And most insurances don’t even cover X-rays every six months. Sometimes they cover one full-mouth X-ray once every 24 months, or I’ve seen even as far out as 36 months, and maybe a bitewing here and there.
So for us, the digital image is important, because we can see the progress of the patient’s oral floor, and for those of you who do a lot of ortho or pediatric ortho-type treatments, you always need to have that recorded photo. What we’ve done is, the first time we see the patient, we take a full-mouth X-ray, no problem. On their follow-up, we take the digital image, which falls under the oral facial photos. Or you can have it as a diagnostic cast, and again, billers in the front office know better than I do that not every time will they pay, or they won’t pay them together.
So we alternate between digital photography and X-rays, billing that as our images. Every six months, we alternate: photo, X-ray, photo, X-ray. That gives me the two bitewings, maybe two PAs, and then I get the digital photos I need from the patients. Some insurances actually cover that. I know some of you are doing a records fee for the ortho benefits, but the reality is, for me, a digital fee is an advantage, because now you’re not just talking about X-rays. The word digital becomes a bigger value in the practice: we’re not exposing everyone to X-rays every time they come in.
[00:21:11] Prevention: what makes an ideal restoration
So that leads us to the prevention conversation, right? The next P in our dental practice is prevention. What does that mean? The word prevention means trying to keep patients from getting degradation of tooth, or decay.
For us, our main goal is to talk about what is the ideal restoration. What are the properties we always love to see in restorations? Do we want them to be fluoride-releasing? Do we want them to neutralize acid? Do we want strength? Compressive strength versus flexural strength? Or shrinkage, where you do a filling and it all shrinks after a year or two? And most importantly, radiopacity. You need to be able to see it. And then color stability. If it’s an anterior tooth, I don’t want to see the bonding layer after two or three years; I want to see that same bonding look the way it did on day one. To me, these are the most important features in picking the ideal restoration.
I’ve teamed up with what I’ve understood as the Giomer technology, and Giomer technology has all these properties in it. Giomer fillers have fluoride ions. They have acid resistance through fluorapatite. The antibacterial effect: it actually repels bacteria. It allows you to have multiple layers without sensitivity. A lot of times when you do a filling or restoration on patients, all of a sudden they have hypersensitivity the next day, right?
So Giomer technology has been added to my verbiage, because it gives me the qualities I’m looking for in a restoration, to help patients not have a redo or a failure in that restorative material, unless they’re not flossing or taking care of their own teeth.
When you start to look at these properties and learn about the different products out there, fluoride, to me, is important. But what does that mean? A lot of products have fluoride in them. But after a while, they release it and they don’t recharge. After 24 to 48 hours, the fluoride releases, and that’s it. Fluoride staying in high concentration and being able to get recharged: that’s what Giomer products are.
[00:24:02] Beautifil: strength, shrinkage, color stability
Looking at strength across different products, one of the Giomer products is Beautifil. Again, Shofu, a sponsor of this program, has this product called Beautifil, with great strength and Giomer properties. When you take the other filling materials head to head, they all do well. But when you look at shrinkage, the Beautifil products have the least amount of shrinkage of what’s out there in the dental restorative market.
And when you look at color stability: can I use it for anterior teeth? The answer is yes. Have you seen where you do a composite resin and a year or two later you see this little yellow around the resin? Is that the bonding material? Is that the shrinkage? What is that? So you go and polish it, and now you see the line you had drilled before. It becomes really destructive to the patient’s psyche, why their teeth are starting to show lines.
These Giomer products are a particle-diameter hybrid composite material, so nano-filled that you can polish it, and I can actually do chairside veneers, and I’ll show you some cases that are amazing. Why is that important? Because for some of these kids, it’s their adult teeth, and you get that incipient little decay interproximally, and you’re trying to be as delicate as you can, not opening up those huge slots, I like to say. You put the restoration in, and a year or two later, guess what happens? It starts to show that yellow. With the right restoration, with the Giomer material inside, antibacterial, you can see the radiopacity on the X-ray, and it’s beneficial to these patients to use a product that has those technologies in it. I even use it for Class II.
[00:26:30] FIT SA as a self-adhesive liner
The next line is: can you use this as a self-adhesive? What Shofu did was release a product called FIT SA, and that is what I use for kids morning and night. It’s a self-adhesive resin. What does that mean? You don’t need to etch. You don’t need to bond. You simply put the FIT SA on. I’m going to go deeper into this. I’ve been using it as a liner on some of my Class II deep fillings, and then I go back, etch, bond, and put the Beautifil over the FIT SA.
Look at cases where there was shrinkage. This is a restoration I did, and about three years later I started to see this small radiopacity coming back. I refilled it, and it’s now been seven years running, on both tooth number five and 29, with the combination of the liner, the FIT SA, and the Beautifil composite right over it. So those of you who are general dentists that I saw on the attendee list: that’s the kind of margins we’re looking to get. That’s the kind of material we want to use so you don’t get the shrinkage, and it’s wonderful to see these patients helping us get better dentistry done, right? Because I want the product to help the patients, and to partner with the right company.
[00:28:20] From seven bonding generations to an all-in-one resin
Now, I mentioned self-adhesive composites, so let’s talk about that. If you recall, the very early generation of white fillings, we call it gen one, we had to condition the tooth and etch the tooth, and there were two bottles we had to mix together, and multiple steps. There was a light cure, then you put the bonding, and then you light cure, and then you get into the next generation of bonding materials. It was all about bonding materials: how do you bond? By the seventh generation, not only did you get great bond strength, but you ended up with just one bottle, right? We were done with multiple bottles and mixing the yellow with the white and all those different things.
So to me, I think the future is actually here, and that is generation eight, which is the FIT SA. Because the resin itself has bonding quality, I don’t need to use a bonding agent. I simply put the resin on, cure, put more resin on top, and I’m done. For Class I cases, for easier cases where you sometimes see these bonding layers shrink, you don’t see those stain lines anymore. It’s all-in-one, is what I like to call it. Its unique filler structure lets you avoid etching, and that is key, because think about it: every time I put that etch on the gums, I get a little bit of bleeding, right? So I’m able to do this without damaging any soft tissue during placement.
You can use self-adhesive composites for Class I. Obviously, those are for non-load-bearing areas. For kids, it’s great. Class IIIs, Class IVs, even Class V restorations, which is what I use it for all the time. I use it as a liner as well, and using it as a PRR and sealant is ideal, because have you had patients who have a lot of saliva? Sometimes they wiggle around, and now you’ve got to etch, and then bond, and then put the sealant on, and you hope you didn’t get any saliva in there and try to keep everything as dry as you can.
So the reality is, it’s very simple. You put a half-millimeter layer on top, just one little layer, and leave it for about 10 or 20 seconds. You light cure for about five seconds, then you fill the additional layer with the FIT SA. Once you have two millimeters thickness or less, you’re good. Beyond two millimeters, FIT SA isn’t the right product. Normally I use this for patients where we have an emergency and want to close something real quick. In this case, I did a little bit of etch and put the FIT SA over the teeth.
Sorry, let’s go back to the last slide. There we go. You can sandblast, or you can wash, but about two millimeters is a good enough thickness to play with. Again, I use it for PRR a lot. It is a nanohybrid. It’s very strong, it’s got long-term durability, and it’s excellent for polishing. Looking at this product, I think in some of your pediatric practices, it’s definitely needed. For me, as a general practitioner, it’s saved my Class Vs, because I always had a whole bunch of issues with gingival recessions on fours and fives. Without having to damage the gums, it’s a lot easier for me to put this layer on and see how the patient does, and they do great. Geriatric patients love it.
[00:32:59] Marcus’s hockey-puck repair, no drill and no numbing
In this particular case, when I saw Marcus, he had taken a big hockey puck to his teeth, around 9:00 at night. A very difficult time for him. We had to put him back together real quickly, because he was going back to school out of town, and his dentist was in Alabama or somewhere. We said, “Okay, let me see what I can do real quick.”
We put a little bit of a layer on there, and we used the Beautifil in this case, and the Shofu polishing discs. Sandblasted, didn’t drill anything, didn’t numb, and simply put on this flowable material with the Giomer inside. Within about an hour and a half, the patient had his smile back, and it was good enough as a temporary to get back to his dentist and hopefully get some final restorations. But it took away the cold and hot sensitivity for sure, because he had some dentin exposure, right?
So when you look at these cases, you start to see multiple uses for them, where the polishing material is important too, right? If you have a chipped tooth, or a tooth that’s just not quite angled right, we can do more than some enamelplasty: we can put some layers on top and make the patient’s teeth look a lot better. Shofu has another product, the Super-Snap X-Treme polishing kit, that I’m just amazed with. I use these after my white fillings, but most importantly, my fine-tune polishing is with the Super-Snap, and I can’t say enough about it. I very seldom pick up the drill. I typically use the Giomer material and injectable composites, and we’re good to go. I’ve been doing this for going on seven years now, and I haven’t had any patients come back or pop off, and we’ve been very happy with it.
[00:35:16] My son’s airway: expanders, a tongue tie, and the cone beam
So using a bioactive material is important. I’ll give you a personal story, because I talked to you about my sons. Ashton and Shayden are my two sons, and my youngest, Shayden, who happens to be this guy right here, always had a little bit of a challenge. He had some airway issues, always grinding his teeth. Not just grinding: I’m talking snoring that we could hear from three rooms across our house.
When I took him to a few orthodontists, they said, “Well, that’s just growing. He’s just growing.” At the time, I was treating a lot of adult patients with oral appliances and sleep appliances, and I said, “Could it be that maybe he’s having an airway issue?” And they said, “No, this is just growing. Kids grind their teeth anyway. That’s what happens. Everybody does it.”
When I first got my cone beam, my very first patient was my own son. Good job. And there he is right there getting his little scan, and I can see constrictions. I asked him, “Shayden, how are you doing with your nose breathing?” He wasn’t. He’s a mouth breather. So I said, “You know what? I want to do what I do on adults.” I started expanding him, put him on expanders and just cranked away.
My wife was thinking I’m crazy, that I’m experimenting on our own son. And he had a tongue tie, and I was proposing to laser that, and my wife thought I was absolutely crazy. But I thought, this is what I do on adults in some ortho phases, uprighting their teeth or expanding to get them a few millimeters. If you have crowded teeth and you upright them and make tongue space, doesn’t that give you a little bit better air? So that’s what I went with for my own son.
Granted, as he grew and I kept expanding, his airway started to get a little better, and that whole grinding went away. He was allergic to multiple things: eggs he couldn’t have, cats he was allergic to. Maybe he grew out of it, I don’t know. But the reality is that I can at least hear him breathe. I can hear him not gargling or struggling at night, just by getting that expansion and getting his arch into a position where I thought it would be better.
[00:38:08] The chipped tooth, and do-it-yourself dentistry (video)
He’s a clown. He put me through a good five years of stress. After I put his teeth in a nice position, my wife brings him to the office: he chipped number eight at age eight. Sure enough, what am I to do? I glued the tooth back on, and it didn’t stay on. I tried so many different techniques, and I said, “You know what? I’m going to pick up what I’ve been preaching about.” I picked up the Giomer injectable composite, and he’s had the same tooth since. He’s 11 now.
Why is this important? Because when you talk about the materials being used in your practice, you want to be able to use them on your own family. I know my kid doesn’t brush well. He tells me he brushes, but he doesn’t. The reason I picked this type of product is that it repels decay. It gives me a better anti-plaque property, and most importantly, it doesn’t get build-up. Have you seen when you get a filling done and the gum line around it is full of plaque and build-up? Not in this case. I haven’t had issues with him, or sensitivity. I will admit that with my own kid, he says he brushed, but when my hygienist starts to clean his teeth, I hear her yelling at him every time.
So let me give you a glimpse of what do-it-yourself dentistry looks like with these two kids. I thought I could add this to our wonderful little slides today, how they do their own dentistry in the back of my office. Give me one second.
Video (the kids): Stop. So, I’m going to throw this football, and there’s floss attached to it, and the floss is attached to his tooth, so when I throw it, his tooth is going to come out with it. Wait. Ready? Three, two, stay right here, one, throw it. Oh. Where is it? Where did it go?
[00:41:05] Parents: 59% of patients don’t trust the dentist
All right, I think we’re back. When you look at the key factor in all of this, parents are important, right? Parents, and building trust, is important. So why do I put the last, final P as parents? Because, and I’ve shown this before, patients just don’t trust us.
There was a poll taken of 25,000 patients who went to the dental office, back in the day of 1-800-DENTIST. 1-800-DENTIST asked those patients why they did not have treatment, and 59% of those patients said they didn’t trust the dentist. 23% were afraid, 10% were confused. Now, I want to point to cost. Look, it says 8% cost.
When they called the dental offices and asked the front office why the patients they sent didn’t accept treatment, they said the patients didn’t have the money. They said it was too expensive. Out of 25,000 patients, all of them said that they didn’t have money. But when they actually did the poll with the patients themselves, only 8% said it was because of cost. Again, 59% didn’t trust the dentist. And keep in mind, 23% are still afraid, and I think that’s a bigger number, especially now.
[00:42:57] COVID, the mouth, and the trust conversation
Given that, who really wants to go to the dentist? When was the last time you sat in a dental chair, especially these days? We look like big bubble wrap these days, right? Looks scary. I don’t know how you guys do it, you doctors and team members. It’s amazing when you’re trying to get that child to cooperate.
The economic impact of what’s happened with COVID is important, and I want to share a bit about that. When COVID hit, everybody was worried about discretionary spending: there’s going to be doom and gloom, there’s going to be 40-some percent less spending. Well, what happened? We all opened up around July. We had a bigger June, a big July, and a big August, and now here we are going into potential shutdown mode.
The reality is, what if the patients trusted us? If we had those communication tools open: the app, the web, the little intraoral camera. They come in, we take the bigger camera. We’re telling them how important it is to keep your teeth clean, because guess what goes through your mouth, right? The mouth is direct access to your respiratory tract for COVID, right? Your lungs. So when patients see that plaque, that buildup, that decay, now you can have a conversation that you could potentially be lowering your immunity and increasing the risk of COVID by not cleaning, not being hygienic, by not doing what we’re recommending.
These serious conversations at some point have to happen, and that’s the trust factor. Look, in my practice, every time I see a patient, I talk to them about immunity, about what happens when you neglect your mouth, not flossing, all of those things. But it wasn’t until COVID was really hitting my patients that they understood what we’re talking about.
So building the trust is important. Partnering with the right company, using the right tools, empowering your team, establishing pre-visit communications. Having a tool that patients have at home, not just a toothbrush and floss, and taking digital photos of all patients, because you cannot treat what you can’t see. That’s important.
[00:46:02] Q&A and close
Now, I know we have a little bit more time. I’m more than happy to take some questions. Let me see if there’s some questions here.
“What is the brand of camera you send to the patients?” It’s 4Smile.com. You can go on there; it should be online. She said, “I tried googling 4Smile.” They should be online. If not, I’ll send a link over, and we can go from there. If you have any questions, this will be the best time to ask. […]
While you guys are typing in your questions, I wanted to show you the Shofu video, going back to that pre-treatment. I’ve put it on my site, and there’s a YouTube link to it. I thought it would be very good for patients to see it before they come into my practice, because it tells them how we use a single-dose unit and that we’re using antibacterial material. We want to educate the patients as much as we can.
Video (Shofu promotion, condensed): A narrated product video for FIT SA, a self-adhesive flowable composite with Giomer technology. It claims the product removes the bonding step, reduces chair time, and showed no failures or secondary decay after eight years in a University of Florida study. Indications listed: liner, Class III, Class V, small non-load-bearing Class I, and PRR. (00:47:58 to 00:49:39)
All right, let me get back to it. There was one question while we were watching that video about the camera. The Shofu camera is not sold through distributors that I know of. I think it’s direct from Shofu, so I’m sure after the webinar they might give you some information on where to get them. I bought it from Shofu directly. I hope that helps.
I know some of you want to make sure we talk about the CEs. Your CE will be emailed to you an hour after the end of the webinar, and Sprig has some sweet savings for you. Be sure to check the email for your promo code. They have some upcoming hands-on workshops that I was told to share with you, in Dallas and Vegas, and let’s hope in 2021 we’re all vaccinated and out in Vegas. Hopefully I can see you guys in Vegas. And if you want to get in touch with Sprig, there are some emails.
I hope that has helped some of you get some information and details on how I run my practice. I’m at home, and I hope one day I see all of you face-to-face. For now, I really appreciate the time that was given to me, and I hope you have a great rest of your evening. Thank you very much.
