Dental impressions are a fact of life when it comes to many office treatments. Whether for orthodontic treatments, including braces and clear aligners, or tooth replacements and restorations, a model of your mouth is crucial for moving your treatment forward.
In the past, this was a completely analog job. A dental technician filled a tray with a gunky substance placed over your lower and upper arches to create an inside-out model of your teeth. Then, a lab could make plaster casts from those molds.
It sounds simple enough, but those who’ve experienced impressions made in this way can tell you about the gagging, claustrophobic feeling you need to endure before the gunk gets hard. It only takes about 15 minutes if everything goes well, but it feels like forever during the process.
There’s a better way. At Nobel Dentistry, we’ve embraced the digital dentistry age, so you’ll find no dental impression trays lurking in our Koreatown office. In their place, we’ve added the 3Shape Scanner, a revolutionary way to make detailed and precise three-dimensional models of your mouth and teeth without physical impressions.
The drawbacks of impression trays
One of the biggest problems with conventional dental impressions is failure rates. Enduring the discomfort of a single set of impressions is terrible enough. Removing the molds may damage the impression material, compromising the accuracy of your results. The solution? New trays and a repeat of the process. No, thank you.
Since these trays work by displacing the mold material, that goop overflows into your mouth. It can make you gag, and that’s on top of the jaw-stretching posture you need to hold as the impressions set. There’s simply no way to make physical impressions a comfortable experience.
Intraoral scanning
Enter the 3Shape digital dental scanner. Instead of bulky trays filled with goo, a handheld digital scanner resembles an electric toothbrush in size and shape but with the bristle head cut off. The scanner wands in and around your mouth and creates a complete digital record of your teeth and gums.
Using computer-assisted design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) technology, your digital impressions become powerful files, forming the basis on which treatments can be planned and creating the raw data necessary to manufacture dental appliances.
There’s no discomfort for you; we no longer need to send molds to dental labs. Planning your dental work now takes place on a computer, so you can often see the results awaiting you. Best of all? There’s no goop.
We can tell you more about the benefits of dental scanning during your next visit. Call or click to schedule an appointment with us for routine dental care, cosmetic procedures, or more complex care, like bridges, crowns, or implants; comfortable knowing that the 3Shape system is waiting if you need digital impressions.
Book your visit today. We’re located in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles, California.