CEREC®

CEREC® allows for one-day cosmetic dentistry treatment. At our Orange County, California dental practice, we employ the latest in dental technology for the benefit of our patients, and this system allows us to drastically reduce treatment time while providing for improved control over the procedure.

DR. TY CALDWELL: CEREC is a new technology and essentially a new service, but it's also a piece of equipment. So when we look at that, it enables the patient to come in, and if they're a candidate--let's say we're going to do a crown or a partial filling. Instead of taking the ooey-gooey impressions that we used to take, and then sending those off to the lab, now we actually use a computer-enhanced photograph to take the image. Then we design with the technology on the computer that image, and we create your custom mold. We push "print" and essentially at the end of our hallway, we have a milling machine which we can get up and watch work, and you'll see your crown will be fabricated in about ten minutes. After you watch that, we put you back in the chair, we polish the crown, and boom--you're done. You walk out the door with a finished restoration. This is ideal for--we've had people who have come in from out of town and said, "I'm here on a business trip; I have to have this done in a day. What can you do?" And they expected to get a temporary crown--no, we said, "you're done." Somebody that's in a hurry, of course. People that want to get a lot of dentistry done in a day, of course. But really, one of the reasons that we're getting on the CEREC bandwagon right away is it's just the beginning of what will be done with technology. You have to learn it now, because as this train gets a-moving, we need to be ready for that. We will be using this technology to do all kinds of services with implants and customized splints and things that most patients don't really think about, but for now, just the idea of convenience is just an awesome thing. One of the reasons that CEREC was developed is because we wanted to use the strongest materials as dentists that we could, but to get the strongest materials it has to be processed in the lab under high pressure and high vacuum. But we couldn't do that in our local labs so we had to compromise and we'd have less strength in the material but a way to manufacture it. Now we can use the computer and the strength of the material, and put those together, and also get convenience at the same time. Technology is a wonderful thing. As we grow with dentistry, new things come about all the time. I heard about CEREC about 20 years ago, but in my opinion it wasn't ready to use until recently. They've developed it and developed it, and now we're very excited about it. The latest generation of CEREC lets us deliver the product that we want to give to the patient, which is high quality and good service all at once.