My New Job, and a Glimpse into Esthetic Dentistry

In the past month, I started working at a dental lab where dental work - crowns, implants, veneers, bridges, etc. - is fabricated so dentists can place them in patient's mouths.

I'm not doing any of the CDT (ceramic dental technician) stuff just yet (though I get to start wax-ups next week! hooray!!), but I've been helping my boss work on a presentation for these big esthetic dentistry conferences in Germany and Poland. It's great, because I get to help design his presentation and the yearbook nerd in me is certainly rejoicing. I've been using (and trying to get better at) Photoshop and Illustrator.. Now if I could just figure out Lightroom..

As I've been helping him prep, I've begun to learn a lot about the ideas behind esthetic dentistry as well (I'll be spelling esthetic with an "e", so if that bothers you, I'm sorry.. lol). Dental students always tell me that school whizzes by you in a flash, and that when they get out of school, they barely feel ready to take on real patients, in a real practice. I've always wondered if there's enough time to develop a trained hand for the detailed work in dental school, and whether the curriculum trains your eye for esthetically pleasing work. Since my boss is a CDT, he focuses heavily on the artistic component of dentistry, and tells me that often times, dentists aren't even aware when there's an esthetic issue with the labwork because they haven't learned how to see these problems yet.

Getting a glimpse into the world of esthetic dentistry, there are a couple of things I've learned so far.

1) Learn to use a DSLR.
2) It's necessary to have a good understanding of the different materials available for restorative work. Metamerism (different appearances of materials depending on light source) is created by the material's properties of translucency, opalescence, and reflection.
3) Shade-taking is much harder than it sounds, and most important in successful lab work.
4) Taking steps for improved communication between the dentist and CDT is extremely important.
5) Aim for esthetic, not cosmetic. It's just verbatim, but "esthetic" implies the idea of improving natural beauty, whereas cosmetic implies something that is added to one's appearance and sounds fake.

At lab, I met a prosthodontist (apparently there are only like.. 300 of them in the US???) who told me about his work, which tends to involve only 1-3 really big patient cases at a time, with often, near full mouth restoration. Crowns, veneers, implants, bridges, the works. Pretty interesting stuff. I don't know if I want to specialize or not yet, but meeting some of his patients, you can tell his work in collaboration with the lab has been literally life-changing for many. More updates and insights from my job to come, so stay tuned!