How to control your dental treatment success?

Generally, treatment success depends on controlling variables. And in dentistry, there is both external variables and internal variables. External variables, we're talking about pretty much.

The dentist, the dental laboratory, we're talking about dental materials and dental implants. When we're talking about internal factors, then it's the patient's genes, genetics. We'll talk about a little bit later how genetics does affect, like periodontal situations and so forth, even tooth decay. Oral hygiene is an internal factor. Biting forces, the discrepancies in the bite that happens as patients grind their surfaces of their teeth down, facial muscles that are not in harmony can cause a lot of problems, especially dental failures. We'll take a look at that. Obviously, previous restorations, if you have had like root canal teeth or large fillings in the past, they can fail and they can cause failures in the mouth as well as a lot of the medications out there that patients take. You know, a lot of them cause dry mouth and so forth. Generally speaking, a dentist is someone who has a degree, title is dds, dmd, bds, and generally they become a dentist after going to, graduating from high school, seven to eight years of dental school. So basically a dentist who graduates from the dental school, then either they go into a specialty school and they become a periodontist, a prosthodontist, an oral surgeon, someone who does root canal endodontist, or they basically are like myself, Dr. Cavallero, Dr. Chin, who go into extremely extensive training over the years. And we have.

Gone through the lvi, which is like the Juilliard Academy of Arts in dentistry.

And we accumulate lots and lots of continuing education hours. So we're working during the daytime. Several weeks out of the year we go and we really become trained and so forth, take time out of our practices. On average, most dentists I know here in the state of California, the only requirement is about 50 hours of continuing education. Whereas someone like us, we usually do about 10 times that amount every two years. Okay, so when you're selecting a dentist, this is something you might want to look at. Are they LVI trained? Are they pankey trained, Are they a prosthodontist, are they oral surgeon, how much experience they have. No matter what information is out there on the dentist wall and so forth, you really need to.

I personally believe the best way to determine that is to really ask the dentist for reference list. Okay, so if you're considering, you know, implants, ask him, okay, how many implant cases have you done? And can you show me a Reference list of 50 people and any high quality dentists who are doing this for a living, they'll be happy to share that with you. So really, the reference list is a big key because sometimes it is very hard for you as the public to dissect through the education of a dentist. Also, we'll talk about the dental lab. The dental lab is a big part of it. So the dentistry, especially in complex dentistry, dental labs, technicians are very much like the dentist. They have trainings that can span over years of training and it can be just hands on experience or they can go to school and become really trained. So again, what I'm going to teach you tonight is also explore who is doing some of your dental work. You know, you need to, as a consumer understand that you know something that goes inside your mouth. You need to understand where it was made, what type of material was used, and is that lab something that is supplying you quality products. So we'll talk about that. Then we'll talk about implant manufacturing. Different implant companies out there. We have implants, implants that are from, you know, China, Korea. Then we have US brand, European brands, what the differences are, there are a lot of different costs involved and so forth. So hopefully I can put shed some light on all of this information.