Bob Conte A patient walks into your office having lost an old 4 unit PFM bridge. It happens. What to do? In the days B.C. (Before CEREC) our course of treatment may look like this.
- - Take a preliminary alginate for provisional bridge fabrication
- - Pour alginate in a fast setting stone to create model
- - Anesthetize and refine preparations
- - Retract tissue
- - Trim model. Try to locate a few denture teeth to serve as pontics and assemble them within the model.
- - Fabricate a vacuum formed shell for the provisional. Trim the template.
- - Take final impressions for your bridge with pvs and wait for the material to set
- - Take opposing alginate and Blue Mousse bite registration
- - Fill the provisional template with Luxatemp or similar, seat in the mouth and wait for material to set
- - Now spend 10-15 minutes creating a dust storm in your lab as you trim the acrylic bridge to obtain proper contours and contacts.
- - Polish and cement temp.
Now what was the most difficult part of this whole process? Making the provisional bridge. Think about the steps that go into the process. It takes a lot of effort to create a well-fitted and esthetic provisional that will last for the length of time needed until the final bridge is completed.
Let’s look at the same scenario in a CEREC office.
- - Anesthesize and refine preparations
- - Retract tissue (perhaps)
- - Scan both arches and the buccal bite in Sirona Connect
- - Save and move the case to Chairside 4.2 software.
- - Design the bridge digitally
- - Mill the bridge out of Vita CAD Temp or Telio Cad
- - With just about zero adjustments polish/glaze and cement the bridge
- - Send case to your favorite Sirona Connect laboratory for a zirconium reinforced bridge.
The milling time for a 4 unit bridge is approximately 40 minutes. If you look at all of the steps needed in the first scenario, you’d be hard pressed to beat the amount of time and energy needed to create the provisional. The result is a beautiful, well-fitted and durable provisional. All you had to do was push the start button!
Mill those temps!
