After the teeth were lost, the bone and gum tissue followed.  This made for a very difficult esthetic situation.

How could she have ‘normal’ size teeth with all the bone and tissue gone?  And to compound the situation she was trying to manage gum disease around the other existing teeth, with the help of a periodontist (gum specialist).

Now, since we’ve looked at the final result, let’s look where we started.

The patient lost her front teeth many years ago and so had to get a bridge across the front. When it was constructed the dentist did not take into account the shape of her lips or smile. So this old bridge has what we call a ‘reverse smile line’. That means her front teeth don’t follow the shape of the lower lip giving a worn, older appearance to the smile. This also occurs in many people that grind their teeth.

We’ll look at where we started in another post. But I want to emphasize this very important point. All the parties involved….the dentist, the patient and the ceramist….should have a ‘final result’ in mind. This is usually accomplished by making a ‘wax up’ on stone models of the patient’s teeth. This helps everyone envision what the finished product will look like. Think of it this way….when you build a house, what’s the very first part of the process? You make a blueprint of what you want to build. It’s the same thing in dentistry.

Sometimes we should start with the ‘end result’ in mind when starting a case. With this thought, take a look at this very nice case. You can see the teeth have lots of brightness and are very life-like. The tissue is healthy looking. And the shape and coutour of the teeth compliment this pretty ladies’ lips and face.

Ok…there’s nothing dental related here. But since I AM into gadgets I got a kick out of the worst 007 gadgets ever. See how many of these you can remember: 007

One of my favorite products for keeping spyware and adware in check is called Ad-aware. I’ve used it routinely for years now and it’s always worked well. They recently updated this program. There’s a few different versions but I’ve always been happy with the free-ware. Read about it here.

It’s become commonplace to store data online (or ‘offsite’). In dentistry an office can back-up and store their entire hard drive with online services. Many people (including myself) store photos this way. Here’s an interesting article discussing some of the potential problems with this: article