Today I want to share with you how we took our new graduate, Dr Liam Dury, who joined our practice with no prior CAD/CAM experience to where he is comfortable making perfectly fitting, single visit crowns in less than one week.
There are many times dentists have come to our clinic or training courses with no prior experience in CAD/CAM or Digital Dentistry. Although the systems are now mainstream and the benefits are obvious, they have not had the opportunity to practice and utilise this technology. As a dentist you may worry without adequate training these machines will sit in the corner gathering dust and feel the investment is wasted.
This has become even more obvious when we recently hired a new associate with close to 5 years of dental experience but absolutely no experience in digital dentistry, but more on that later.
When I was going through dental school I was lucky to have a father, Dr Hamid, who was practising digital dentistry and an early adopter of CAD/CAM. This made me realise early on in my career that there was more to dentistry than what was being taught in university, and that dental school while providing you with the foundations, did not set you up to excel in digital dentistry.
On top of that many of the courses out there are run by companies with conflicting interests and always claim their system is the best. So you don't know who's opinion to trust. This was the main reason we developed our own digital dentistry courses to give dentists the hard truths without worrying about offending the company sponsoring the training.
For the past 10 years, Dr Hamid was forced to learn CAD/CAM by perseverance, trial and error and attending multiple courses both local and international. Back when he started, the technology was so new this meant that practically no training was available and information was scarce.
Fast forward to today, at our clinic all five of our other associate dentists now have a strong grasp of CAD/CAM and use it daily to produce great results and experiences for our patients. Dr Liam, the newly hired associate, picked up some key skills within 3 days of training with us and is now comfortable enough in the digital workflow that he provided a patient with a perfect fitting and well produced single visit CAD/CAM crown.
Watch Dr Liam Make a CEREC Crown After Only 3 Days of Training:
It is truly remarkable watching Dr Liam adopt CAD/CAM so quickly and so well considering he had no prior experience with it. No doubt this is a testament to his own dedication and desire to learn. It also shows how user friendly CAD/CAM systems have become compared to when we started 10 years ago.
What has become obvious to us over time is the lack of training available. Especially objective training not tied to a manufacturer or sales company. This was the main reason we developed our own digital dentistry courses to give dentists the hard truths without worrying about offending the company sponsoring the training.
Want to learn more about using CEREC effectively within your clinic? Check out our online CEREC courses as part of our Membership.
Don't get stuck in an analogue dentistry past and fall behind other dentists adopting digital in their practice.
You no longer have to keep taking messy impressions that are uncomfortable for your patients. Nor using time-consuming labs that are using the same technology that you could be utilising in-house.