We're very proud of the fact that we have become known as a cutting edge dental laboratory and all the benefits this brings to our surgeons and their patients.
Over the years we have been involved in many Beta trials with some of the worlds biggest dental companies, which has given us a great insight into some of the weaknesses in current materials and systems which they are looking to overcome by heavily investing in alternative solutions.
One of the biggest leaps forward was definitely the use of CAD/CAM systems such as Atlantis to produce out titanium, chrome and zirconia sub structures (and even whole crowns in some case) as this allowed us to move away from some of the inconsistency, inaccuracy and wasted expense that these old methods had.
But recently we have seen a very exciting shift away from focussing on the machining of the custom component parts and a focus on the very materials we use to deliver the final prosthesis to our patients.
What's wrong with what we have?
Realistically with many cases there's absolutely nothing wrong with the Porcelain, composite or acrylic we have successfully used for many years to restore our implant cases, but if we have an implant restoration on a posterior tooth where the patient has shown a history of destroying restorations then maybe we can look to the new hybrid materials that are now available? These mix the higher aesthetics we will want from ceramics with the qualities that we would ideally want on an implant restoration.
Shock absorbency
One of the main characteristics of new Hybrid ceramics like Vita Enamic or 3M ultimate is the fact that they actually absorb shock from the opposing dentition.
Chip resistance
Due to the fact that these materials are produced using CAD/CAM technology, they are a monolithic structure which greatly reduces the risk of decontamination, further more these new engineered materials have been specifically designed to prevent crack propagation.
Thanks to our knowledge of CAD/CAM and depth of experience in using this with the new materials such as Visio.lign (which we use on full arch cases) and Vita Enamic we have been able to produce a screw retained CAD/CAM Hybrid Ceramic crown that offers the benefits mentioned above.
Further to being an ideal posterior restoration, this crown is also vastly more cost effective than a traditional screw retained ceramic layered implant crown.
Thanks to our partnership with Atlantis we are also able to offer a restoration that has a custom titanium contour against the tissue and then transitions to these new Hybrid Ceramics in the rest of the screw retained crown restoration, think of it as a custom link abutment +
This is not a one size fits all solution, in fact we still produce many porcelain bonded screw retained units where aesthetics are absolutely critical, but it's always great to have another solution that we can mix and match into our restorative toolkit when we are looking at the needs of our patients.
We have used monolithic crowns on cement retained restorations for many years, starting initially with full zirconia and then moving on to the new Hybrid Ceramics such as Vita Enamic purely because of the improvements in aesthetics and functionality they offer.
We have more information on both of these over on our website or please free to call us on 01765 607347