Is the Stoneage of Dentistry Dead?

Episode #392 with Dr. John Cranham & Lee Culp, CDT

Does a dental practice with robots and artificial intelligence sound far-fetched? It may seem like science fiction, but advances in digital dentistry make the impossible a reality. In today’s episode, Kirk Behrendt brings Dr. John Cranham and Lee Culp, CDT on the show to discuss how digital dentistry has evolved, the challenges it presents, their brand-new collaboration of Cranham Culp Digital Dentistry, and much more. To find out why the future of dental is digital, listen to Episode 392 of The Best Practices Show!

Main Takeaways:

Digital dentistry is primarily about communication, and making things is secondary.

A scanner is the best place to start when first going digital.

Today’s software is easy and fun to use.

If there’s a focus on digital during dental school, it will become second nature to young dentists.

The future of dentistry is moving toward digital, even to the extent of robotics and artificial intelligence.

Quotes:

“When we look at digital dentistry—and this is where it’s so important—digital dentistry is more about communication than anything else. Making things actually becomes secondary to the communication we have as a dental team, whether it’s restorative dentists, periodontists, orthodontists, oral surgeons, laboratory, whatever. We build virtual patients, and diagnose and treatment plan and restore, if necessary, those patients that we’ve created digitally as a team, on a computer, at the same time, while we’re all looking at the same patient. That’s never been done in the history of dentistry, and that’s really what we can do today, so we can virtually do anything you can conceive.” (06:06—06:54)

“One of the things I think challenges doctors that look at it, is they tend to look at the technologies like a scanner, and they look at the CBCT, and they look at maybe T-scan or a variety of different things, but what they lack often is a way to bring all of these technologies together to be able to evaluate data and to be able to treatment plan and to then make things like wax-ups and provisionals and splints, and all these things. And so that’s where I think the next real evolution is—getting software in the practice that allows the team to, as Lee would say, either be doing things completely in-house or share with an orthodontist or surgeon, and communicate in a way that, if you pull something up and share a virtual instrument through Team Viewer, they can be a hundred thousand miles away and still be like you’re sitting right next to each other.” (09:16—10:19)

“I think the first thing is you get a scanner and you learn how to scan for simple crowns. My concern is a lot of doctors stop there; it’s like the scanner becomes only for simple things, where they can be doing diagnostics and interfacing with labs and utilizing at a much higher level. To me the message is…digital provides us the ability to visualize three-dimensionally for simple and complex things so much better and easier than ever before. And so what I’m most excited about is the ability for doctors to really embrace comprehensive care in maybe a way that they’ve avoided.” (17:18—18:09)

“The software available today is very easy, very intuitive, very fun to use, and it’s great for diagnostics—for just looking at models on an articulator, for just evaluating while the patient is in the chair. The world of digital doesn’t even really know this or comprehend that you can do these things. So, I think that’s our message today—the software or the systems are so much more powerful to do all kinds of things that you didn’t even know they were capable...