Implants, new young patient, ....

It has been an interesting week. We had a patient very recently with 3 new implants restored in on upper right, lower left and lower right. We had another new patient who is only 2 1/2 years old fall out of a stroller and do damage to upper front teeth. Another patient had some nasty, viral ulcers that needed laser treatment. Another patient who has only come in for emergent care hopefully will come in to get 'caught up' very soon.

The patient with the new implants is doing very well. The lab did a beautiful job. They look good and are feeling good according to the patient too. They do feel different because the porcelain has a slightly different quality than tooth structure. He just needed a minor fine-tuning of his bite on Monday.

The young patient fell out of a stroller and displaced her 2 front teeth. There is also swollen gum around these teeth and a swollen lip. She is a sweetheart and doing well. She was seen in a hospital emergency room on Tuesday when this accident happened and then seen in the office on Friday morning. She is still sore. X-rays were taken in the hospital. We took a couple of photos with our intraoral camera this morning. Displaced teeth in young children will usually reposition themselves normally without intervention by a dentist. We will just need to observe and check for infection or nerve death in the future. We may need to take more x-rays to follow up in the future.

The patient with the viral ulcer problem was treated with our dental laser. He has had this treatment a couple of times before. He relies to some extent on other medications but finds that the laser is much more effective and provides almost immediate relief. We also find that when this type of infection occurs and is treated with the laser it doesn't recur as much or usually not in the same location.

It has been a good week!

Vacation: March 29th through April 4th.

The office is closed for the time period above. Most of us are going out of town. We are observing some holidays as well as wishing and praying for the best for all of you, our dental family.

There are two highly qualified dentists who are kind enough to help you with emergencies if the need arises while we are gone. They are Dr. Doroshow & Dr. Sodini.

Dr. Doroshow is a colleague of mine and we are in the same study club and members of the Chicago Dental Society. Dr. Doroshow's office is near Howard and Crawford in Skokie and the office phone number is 847-677-2774.

Dr. Sodini's office is about a block east of my office on Oakton and the phone number for his office is 847-676-9292.

It is a relief for me to know that my dental family will be in good hands while I am on vacation.

CDS meeting

We have been fairly busy at the office. Our usual assortment of patients needing a variety of care has been a little on the light side due to the economy but we are doing pretty well.

The Chicago Dental Society Midwinter meeting was good. There were about 32,000 attendees. I managed a large meeting on Saturday as the Chicago Dental Society representative.

The Smiles of Skokie team went to the meeting as a group on Thursday. We updated our infection control knowledge and added a new hand cleanser system to the office thanks to Dr. Molinari's course. Dr. Roger Levine helped us with our office management skills and provided valuable information to our entire team. It was a good day! [Traffic was terrible in the morning. We drove down in 1 vehicle.]

I was at the meeting on my own on Friday. Dr. Carl Misch's implant lecture was very good. He had some excellent research data and provided a good scientific basis for bridge and implant restorations of a variety of types. He is a very knowledgable and opinionated lecturer.

Saturday, Heidi & I attended separate courses. Mine was on health and stress given by Dr. Uche Odiatu from Toronto, and Heidi took part in a course on dental instrument sharpening and maintenance. Both of us learned a lot. We try to be your positive, health-optimizing resource and Dr. Uche's material will help us serve our patients even better.

It was a good meeting as usual. This year it was held in McCormick Place West for the first time. This venue meant that this huge meeting wasn't scattered over as large of an area as it usually is.

A recent porcelain veneer case.

I firmly believe in only doing the most conservative, best option for my patients. This patient has done a lot of whitening. He wanted a better smile but a natural appearance. We were both happy with the results.

There are more expensive, brand-name veneers. There are also very high strength, extremely well done porcelain veneers fabricated by less well known excellent laboratories. This case was done using the services of the latter type of lab.

Whenever doing veneers or implants for a patient the patients bite and habits need to be evaluated carefully. This patient elected to have a nightguard made and is using it every night to protect his investment in his smile.

Best of Business Award.

I don't know how we were nominated or received this award but it is a nice thing to have. Please click on the title of this post or visit http://www.smallbusinesscommerceassociation.org/Default.aspx to view the web site for this organization.

Any comments about the organization granting this award would be welcome.

Saturday office hours in December.

We will be in the office on Saturday, December 6th, and Saturday, December 19th. Tuesday, December 8th, I have a study club meeting to attend and we will be closing a little earlier.

Conley Study Club last night: Digital X-rays.

Our study club met last evening. A representative from Kodak Dental Systems was our guest presenter. The Kodak sensors are very good. The wired system that they provide is excellent. The presentation highlighted many of the advantages of computer based imaging.

The system in my office is still in my mind the best conventional system. It results in less exposure to radiation than any of the others it seems. As mentioned previously, the radiation exposure to the patient is one third of that for film or conventional digital x-ray sensors like the Kodak sensor. We have the ability to take panoramic images with our system also.

It was a good meeting. It was informative and inspired some good discussion among our group. There were about a dozen of us present for this meeting.

This is a "+" update regarding computers.

This is not directly dental health related. My office is very high tech. We have more computers than team members. This is the age that we live in. As a matter of fact we could probably use another computer or two but that is another story.

Computers are essential but they can also be a big pain. We come to take them for granted when they are working well, but when we have problems with them it is quite often a major headache. My office is fortunate to have Hadi working with us. He set up the network at Smiles of Skokie. We have a server and a high speed networking switch managing our digital x-rays, digital appointment book, .... If you would like Hadi to help you with your computers at home or office he is available. Just let us know and we will get you in touch with him. He is excellent and we are happy to support him and provide all of you with an excellent resource.

Hadi works with 2 utility programs that clean out the excess data that is not needed but really slows up a PC based computer. If you do this on your own you do it at your own risk and you should be fairly knowledgable with computers. One of these programs is "Ccleaner" and the other is "Malwarebytes Anti-Malware". Both of them are free. Use them with care. You can do damage to your system if you use the "Ccleaner" software to "Fix selected issues" in your registry. Hadi doesn't recommend that you use Ccleaner to do this. Ccleaner should just be run in the "Windows" tab and don't let it work with your "Cookies" or "Autocomplete Form History". I would also not let it "Empty Recycle Bin" or do anything with the "... Shortcuts". "Advanced" should not be used at all except by advanced users in my humble opinion. "Malwarebytes" is pretty intuitive to use. If you work with computers much at all this program should be no problem to use. These two programs can help tremendously from what I have found. Thank you, Hadi!

The other program that I have found very helpful is Uniblue's "Registry Booster". This program will analyze your system and do very limited cleaning of the registry unless you pay to register it. Once you have paid for it [less than $30] it will clean all of the problems and back up your registry in the event that it makes an error. I have never had a problem using this software. Hadi doesn't like making changes to the registry but I have found that this helps my computer performance tremendously in conjunction with the other 2 programs mentioned above.

Again, use these 3 suggestions totally at your own risk. If you have other suggestions or would like to contact Hadi for help please get in touch with the office. All of us at Smiles of Skokie know Hadi and appreciate his help and, most of all, we are happy to be of help to you!

Office News. Minimally Invasive Dentistry.

This month's office newsletter is updated. Please check it by clicking on the title of this post.

We have more information about xylitol at the office. We also have some xylitol products.

Minimally invasive dentistry is discussed in the newsletter. I have been using air abrasion for years and it is the best way to remove small areas of decay and prepare surfaces for bonding.

Please visit our web site for more information or do your own Google search.

Best always and have a happy Labor Day weekend!

Digital x-rays and sharing information.

You should be very interested in this subject. As a patient, digital information enables you to have your records taken and maintained extremely efficiently. The digital x-rays that my office takes, expose you to only one third of the radiation that the more conventional other types of digital systems need. We use a phosphor plate system which is also more convenient and comfortable. The plates that we use are sealed in plastic envelopes and then processed in a few seconds. This allows for the images to be read almost immediately and, if needed, be retaken to get the best image possible. If an x-ray needs to be retaken, then you are still exposed to 1/3 less radiation than one image would require with a totally electronic system. From my perspective this is something that is taken for granted due to the fact that we have been using our phosphor sensor system for close to 3 years now.

Just yesterday we had a patient in our office that needed to be sent to a specialist. We took a couple of x-rays and then emailed those directly to the specialist for review before the patient even arrived in spite of the fact that he left our office and went directly to the other doctor's office. What a wonderful benefit!

We can transfer these images to other continents or provide them to patients who are traveling. They can easily be attached to emails just like photos. The images can be stored in a patient's home computer or on their thumb drive. We typically send the images as 'jpeg' files which are the same as your digital photos. This means that they can be viewed on your home computer if you wish.

We also backup all of the office data on a daily basis and have the data, when taken, stored on a computer server at our office which has a dual hard drive 'RAID' system built into it. 'RAID' means literally, "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives". If our computer server has a hard drive failure then it notifies us of the problem and still has a good copy of the data on the 2nd drive. The backup that we make daily is a placed on a portable drive that goes home with me daily. We rotate 5 drives from home to office in order to have multiple copies for the ultimate in safety.

This discussion was prompted by one of our patients that was in on Monday. If you have something that is of interest to you that you would like to see me discuss here, please let me know.