• Archives
  • Products
  • Operative Dentistry
  • Dental Team Communication
  • Practice Management
  • News
  • Research
  • Dental Debates

DentalBuzz: a jolt of current

trends, innovations, and quirks of dentistry

  • Home – Latest Buzz
  • Bloglist
  • Indie Dental Showcase
  • Free Dental Timer
  • Practice printables
  • Podcasts

Best ways to get numb at the dentist

February 3, 2017 By DentalBuzz Staff 8 Comments

nopain

Why “Painless Dentistry” Doesn’t Have to Be An Oxymoron

Dentistry has got a bad reputation!

“No offense doc but I hate dentists.” …said everyone who ever came to see me.
“I was in Vietnam and I’d rather be shot at than come see you.” …said one of my veteran patients.
“My last dentist put his foot on my chest and pulled a tooth out while I wasn’t numb!” …said most people who ever had a tooth extracted.

Why so much hate? In my personal experience, most of the people who hate dentists have had really bad experiences in the past. They’ve got legitimate reasons to be fearful. As a profession, we dentists, especially in years past, haven’t done a great job with pain and anxiety management. Uncontrolled pain and anxiety creates lifelong dental phobics.

Dentistkicklegs

So here’s the secret… While dentistry isn’t ever something that will be fun, it doesn’t have to be the traumatic experience that many people expect. Dentists have a huge number of different tools at their disposal to make dentistry as painless and easy as possible. For the most part, all it takes is a willingness to listen to a patient’s fears and address them with whatever tool is most appropriate.

What?!? We have more options than just “Open wide”, “It’ll only pinch a bit” and “Suck it up”? Yes! I’m going to cover all your options here, from techniques that have been around forever, to the latest advances in painless dentistry.

If you’re a dentist who thinks all dental phobics are over-dramatic and that the previous statements are appropriate, this article may not be for you. You should probably go hang up your drill and find a job that doesn’t require contact with the public. I hear dental insurance companies are always looking for cranky dentists to deny claims. Everyone else, let’s get working on ways to make dentistry better for our patients!

Old School

Let’s start with some options that have been around for a long time. Just because these options are technically “old school” doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be used. It’s my opinion they should be used far more often than they currently are today.

breathe1

Laughing Gas / Nitrous Oxide
Laughing gas is almost synonymous with going to the dentist but somehow many dentists don’t offer this at all.  I’ve heard from many that they find it to be too much hassle. I’ve had the exact opposite experience in my practice. The benefits of laughing gas include decreased anxiety, increased pain tolerance, quick acting effects, and an almost perfect safety profile compared to any other type of sedation. The downsides… ummm…. occasionally people don’t like how it feels and we have to stop using it. So why aren’t more dentists using laughing gas? Beats me. It is the absolute easiest and quickest way to make a dental appointment easier. I often give it away free because it makes the appointment easier for me and the patient. Easier for me + Easier for the patient = A good day!

Sedation
Sedation can range from taking an oral medication before a dental appointment (with or without nitrous oxide) all the way up to IV sedation or general anesthesia. Of all the techniques we go over here, this is by far the most challenging to get trained in and implement due to safety and liability issues with sedation. It is also the most effective option for treating patients who are truly terrified of any type of dental experience. If you’re able to offer this safely and effectively, you’ll really set yourself apart. One option for sedation if you don’t want to go through training is to look for a traveling anesthesiologist who comes to your office and does sedation while you do the dental work. This is a fantastic option where you can focus exclusively on treating your patient instead of worrying about anesthesia at the same time. There are more and more anesthesiologists who offer services like this today. If you’re especially lucky, you might even find a dental anesthesiologist who understands the special challenges that come along with sedating a patient for dental work (dental work is essentially an anesthesiologists worst nightmare).

Air Abrasion
Air abrasion uses a high pressured jet of abrasive particles to conservatively remove smaller to medium sized decay in teeth. As it doesn’t generate any vibrations, pressure, or heat most people don’t need any shots of anesthetic (yay!) to have the procedure done. Many people think air abrasion is a new technique in dentistry. It actually has been around over 60 years! Early on, it wasn’t something that was typically used because the bonding materials needed to do minimally invasive dentistry weren’t invented yet. Now that we’ve got all these great bonding techniques, somehow air abrasion still isn’t routinely used. Very few dentists own an air abrasion device and even less use it routinely. It can be especially useful on children as it is far less “scary” than a dental drill and doesn’t require a shot! Kids who have good dental experiences are far less likely to become dental phobics in the future.

This article by Dr. Gordon Christensen goes into a bit more detail about air abrasion and why he thinks it should be used far more often…  http://www.dentaleconomics.com/articles/print/volume-100/issue-6/columns/ask-dr-christensen.html

New-Fangled Stuff

Distractions
I spent about $400,000 several years ago to build a brand new office. You know what makes the biggest impression on our patients? It sure isn’t the $50k panoramic machine, several thousand dollar chairs, or amazingly efficient layout. It is the $300 television mounted on the ceiling that they can watch during treatment while wearing a pair of noise canceling headphones. OK, OK so televisions aren’t exactly new to the scene. CHEAP flat screen televisions sure are though. I just saw a 37 inch TV at Best Buy the other day for about $150. This is what most dentists charge for a single filling. Considering the benefits, calling it an affordable investment is an understatement. I’ve found it to be equally effective for both adults and children.

Vibraject™ / DentalVibe™
The Vibraject™ and DentalVibe™ play off our overall distraction theme. These devices vibrate a patient’s lip while the injection is being given in order to distract them from the sensation. They’ve been proven to be quite effective and many dentists say they wouldn’t want to give injections without them anymore. If you’re talented you can pull off this trick yourself without the device. Just vibrate a patient’s cheek quickly while giving the injection. Dentists have used this technique successfully for a long time. That is about the only thing I remember about the dentist from when I was a child.

For more information on these devices visit https://www.physicsforceps.com/vibraJect-comfort-solution or https://www.dentalvibe.com/.

Compounded Topical Anesthetic
Topical anesthetic has been used for a long time to reduce the pain associated with the needle stick. Unfortunately the only topical anesthetic that is widely available is 20% benzocaine. This works OK but there are a lot better options out there. The downside… you have to get them specially compounded at a pharmacy. It’s unbelievable that none of the big dental companies have come up with a better topical anesthetic (OK I do actually know why… The FDA approval process is a bureaucratic nightmare and costs a fortune for approval of a new formulation). If anyone in dental product R&D is reading this, I’D BUY A BETTER TOPICAL IN A HEARTBEAT! Get working on it!

My favorite formulation is a compounded gel with 10% lidocaine, 10% prilocaine, and 4% tetracaine. A SMALL dab of this a couple of minutes before an injection does wonders to almost entirely eliminate the pinch of the needle stick.

There are a good number of other formulations but most are some variation of these anesthetics. Some compounding pharmacies offer to add 2% phenylephrine to the gel to prevent but I do not recommend this. Any of these gels with phenylephrine seems to cause high incidence of tissue sloughing in the area where the gel was applied. I’ve only rarely seen minor tissue sloughing with the plain mixture of anesthetics. Once you use compounded topical you’ll never want to go back to plain benzocaine again!

Buffered Anesthetics
Even if the needle stick during a shot is totally painless, the shot can still hurt. Why is this? Most anesthetics used in dentistry are quite acidic. When they are injected they cause quite a burning sensation. This sensation can be minimized by injecting very slowly but people will still occasionally feel it. A couple of years ago a system known as Onset™ was introduced that buffered the anesthetic with sodium bicarbonate in order to bring it up to a more neutral pH level. Buffering solutions is commonly done in medicine but really hasn’t been used in dentistry up to this point. When anesthetic is injected with a pH close to physiologic levels, the burning sensation is almost entirely eliminated. In addition to reducing the burning it also dramatically increases the speed that the anesthetic takes effect. Mandibular blocks are fully complete within a minute and a half. You don’t even have to leave the room before getting started. There are a couple of other buffering systems that have come out since then but Onset™ remains the standard.

Stanley Malamed (You know, the guy who basically wrote the book on dental anesthesia) is a big fan. You should be too!

For more information on Onset™ visit http://www.orapharma.com/products

The Wand™
The Wand™ is a computerized anesthesia device that injects anesthetic at a controlled rate. As we discussed with buffered anesthetics, the rate at which anesthetic is delivered determines whether that uncomfortable burning sensation is felt. The Wand™ keeps this from happening by injecting at an extremely slow and controlled rate that is controlled by a computer, instead of your hand. Interestingly enough, the slow injection rate also provides higher success rates of getting people numb. One additional benefit to The Wand™ is that it looks far less scary than a typical dental syringe. Perception counts for a lot in how pain is experienced. The Wand simply looks like it will hurt less.

For more information on The Wand™ visit their website at http://www.thewand.com/.

Lasers
Lasers are very slowly making headway into dental offices. They can be used to remove tooth structure, oftentimes without any need for an injection. Due to how the laser pulses it actually induces some analgesia in the nerve of the tooth. It is truly needle free dentistry. There are some major downsides with lasers at this point. They can’t remove all types of materials from a tooth like a dental drill can, there is a huge learning curve, major magnification is required, and lastly the units still are wildly expensive (think $100kish). When the price comes down, I think they’ll start showing up in more dental offices but I don’t expect them to replace dental drills anytime soon.

For more information on dental hard tissue lasers you can visit http://www.Biolase.com, http://www.convergentdental.com/solea/, or https://www.lanap.com/laser-dentistry/periolase-mvp-7/

Spray2

Kovanaze™
Kovanaze™ is the first needle free anesthetic option that I know of. Kovanaze™ was approved in the summer of 2016 by the FDA for use as a dental anesthetic and became available for purchase towards the end of the year. Kovanaze™ is a combination of the anesthetic tetracaine and oxymetazoline. This solution is sprayed up the nostril and provides anesthesia from the premolars to central incisor on the same side. Second premolars have a success rate around 64% while the first premolar through central incisor have a success rate of 96%. For major anterior work, such as veneers, this is a game changer. I know that I personally hate giving injections for the maxillary anterior teeth due to the sensitivity of the tissues in this area, especially around the centrals. Going from multiple painful injections to several painless nasal sprays makes these procedures far easier and essentially painless for patients.

The big downside at this point is cost. As of the time of this writing it costs approximately $600 for 30 sprays (or 15 doses as each dose requires two sprays). This is cost prohibitive for routine use by most dentists. Hopefully the price will start to come down and it will come into more routine use in practice. This would be a huge win for patients in general. Injections don’t bother me that much and I’d still pay extra just to have this type of anesthesia. My guess is that I’m not the only one.

As cool as needle free anesthesia is, the real story I’d like to hear is how the inventor originally came up with the idea of nasal spray anesthesia. Also, who was the unlucky person to be the original test subject?!?

For more information on Kovanaze™ you can visit their website at http://www.Kovanaze.com

There are so many different options out there for making dental care easier for patients. Not all of them have to be difficult or expensive. I’d highly recommend that you pick just one of these tools to implement well in practice and see what a difference it can make. Even better, pick several that you don’t currently offer and put them in place. I believe that comfortable patients will be happier, trust us more, and follow through with treatment which is ultimately a win-win for everyone.

 

 

DrMSmileAbout the Author:
I’m Dr. M, a regular dentist with aspirations of being a tooth saving superhero. My website, The Healthy Mouth Project is dedicated to educating and equipping patients to take control of their oral health.

Filed Under: Operative Dentistry, Products Tagged With: air abrasion, dental anesthesia, DentalVibe, Kovanaze, laughing gas, nitrous oxide, topical anesthetic, VibraJect

A hygienist’s answer to “what do you do?”

March 11, 2015 By DentalBuzz Staff 8 Comments

If you read Dentaltown Magazine, you may have received the edited, paper version of this article today in your snail mail box. But because I don’t have to make room for saliva ejector advertisements in the sidebar (seriously, this article helps sell SALIVA EJECTORS!) you can enjoy the original here in its more raw form.

shakehands

A hygienist’s answer to “What do you do?”

by Trish Walraven RDH, BS

You’re at a gathering of acquaintances, a general hob-nobbery of casual conversing, one of those social obligations that you love/hate because you’re really more of an outgoing introvert, someone who plays well with others but enjoys their quiet, navel-gazing world too. Sooner or later you know that the question will be asked.

“So, what do you do?”

No hesitation here. You know what your profession is. You have a title, a position, a calling.

Then that inner part of your thinking begins to twitch.

You weren’t asked about your job title, actually. You were asked a direct question: What do you do?

The typical reaction of hearing that you’re a dentist or hygienist involves a full disregard of the art and compassion that you put into your profession. People want to tell you about their bad experiences as a child, or how much they hate you (but don’t take it personally!). They just nod, warily, quietly, at your response and quickly think of a way to change the subject.

Instead of giving away the conversation and letting it slide into other people’s thought bubbles, then, you can steer the dialogue back to the original question, and the feel-good answer you’ve prepared instead.

“I take care of people’s teeth.”

You’re a regular Mother Theresa now, aren’t you? The way you dedicate your life’s work to helping others, it’s so freaking noble. This response elicits a smile of comfort and familiarity from your obligatory small-talk partner. The conversation can move forward now that your profession has been deemed socially acceptable.

An hour later, driving home, you’re blissfully alone with your thoughts, rewinding your earlier social interactivity, musing over the highlights, and you really, deeply, ask yourself in hindsight, “what do I do?”

I can’t speak for dentists, but if you’re a dental hygienist, you do some pretty strange things, actually.

First of all, perfection to you is wave-shaped. It’s the curve of a thin scallop of attached pinkness that anoints each interproximal space with a coral-tipped point of the healthiest gingiva imaginable. Anything less than this in your patients’ mouths is limbo. Chaos is the reason your job exists, but you always hunger for order and balance. To achieve this imagined perfection in a mouth that is not optimal, then, means that you often resort to some diversions along the way. It’s about the journey, not the destination, right?

How do you handle the patient whose lower anterior linguals are piled with a couple of grams of Grade A calcium phosphate? Sure, you could just chunk the calculus off. But sometimes, when you’re feeling a little dastardly, you carve out the top and the bottom of the tartar evenly, so that you’ve left a neat chalky white mustache, complete with curlicues. With artistic satisfaction, you turn your attention back to your duty and politely erase the Banksy-esque dental graffiti from your patient’s teeth.

This is not something you tell people that you do.

You also tell no one that your deepest fear is running into anything artificial while you’re cleaning someone’s teeth. Your ultrasonic scaler turns into a fierce lead pencil in those situations, which means not only that you are wearing down your precious metal antennae into useless nubs, but also that you’re leaving dark lines where there was once only whiteness. Every last bit of old orthodontic cement has now been revealed like a charcoal rubbing, thanks to you. And you would never admit to leaving a grey streak on a brand new porcelain crown. How could you slip like that? You hope like heck that the prophy paste will get that scary line off before anyone notices.

When it comes to things that you enjoy, then, there’s a bit of hesitation about sharing those stories as well. Like hovering around the periapical abcess that’s begging to be relieved? Or when you’re spraying baking soda slurry under a bridge and the patient becomes aware that its odor speaks more than the thousand words that you could ever say about superfloss? To you the stink is like scoring a point. Or why your trophy at the end of a particularly difficult appointment is a 2×2 gauze loaded with something that looks like buckshot, but is really your patient’s carefully extracted calculus? Fun times.

Probably the most difficult part of your career, though, has to do with patient management. Unless you’re regularly disengaging people from their mouths via nitrous oxide, there are forceful tongues, and lip pulls, and saliva ropes, and people who forget that it’s safe to swallow their own spit. Suck. Suck. Suck. Ten times a minute. At least this way they’re remembering to breathe. When they forget to breathe they feel like they are drowning. It’s not the water; they’re just suffocating because you’re blocking any chance of mouth breathing. Never mind that noses are much more optimal for breathing but whatever. Not everyone has learned how to snorkel either. And how do you convince patients that unless they just ate a handful of almonds, brushing immediately before their dental appointment won’t make your task any easier?

Then there are the patients themselves. Not just their mouths, but the whole person. Patients whose embarrassment about their teeth are the reason they haven’t been to a dentist in a while. People who not only open their mouths but open up to you, tell you their secrets, their fears, their wishes and hopes. People who trust you to take care of them, to love them, to nurture them towards health. They see something special in your eyes, and they open wide.

So go ahead and make it known out there in the big world that you’re hygienist. Or a dentist. You scale teeth. You drill teeth. No biggie. That’s what you do.

What really matters, though, are the reasons why.

 

trishmouth  Trish Walraven RDH, BSDH is a mom and practicing dental hygienist in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. She is a bit of an an introvert when she’s writing dental articles, but you get her together with her best friend from high school and Irish festival beer and she begins to make faces like this. She also makes faces like this under her mask if her patients aren’t paying attention to her flossing instructions.

Filed Under: Anecdotes, Featured, Humor, Operative Dentistry, Preventive Care Tagged With: "i hate dentists", dental humor, dental hygiene, dental hygiene therapy, outgoing introvert, ultrasonic scalers

I wanna be sedated

July 28, 2014 By DentalBuzz Staff 3 Comments

 
By Amanda Kaestner

Sdated

Oh yeah, that’s all we need.

Back in 2006, a research psychiatrist at the National Center for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, H. Stefan Bracha, M.D., suggested upsetting dental experiences could install PTSD in patients, which might then last their entire lives. Along with another couple of miscreants, Bracha advised that any caption including the word “phobia,” or “anxiety,” wasn’t humorless enough to describe the unfounded fear of our selfless, albeit remarkably remunerative, healing art.

What, then, is it exactly that sends our patients into states comparable with returning warriors who’ve experienced an imminent threat of death on the battlefield?

Thanks Again, Sir Larry

Well, patients who are edging onto the chair for an invasive procedure, obviously enough, are more fearful than those who’re scheduled for a cleaning (though we’ve all seen hygienists who seem determined to even out that particular playing field).

Assuming the dentist is warm and caring, rather than emulating Sir Larry, better known as Laurence Olivier’s character Christian Szell in 1976’s Marathon Man, the single most intimidating factor may well be unconsciousness. When you’re out, you’re unable to inhibit a negative event or experience. It’s not so much that patients expect us to slip ’em a roofie and wreak havoc with their innocence, it’s just that – in all fairness – being utterly helpless is an intimidating event for most animals. It’s lack of control… it’s…

Sedation and Anesthesia

Choose your poison. Of the several methods of dentistry sedation that ensure reciprocity on the recliner, each has its proponents, but most have problems, too.

Local Anesthesia. The injection of local anesthetic directly into the area where the work’s to be carried out; this blocks nerve impulses, thus moderating or eliminating pain signals. But it’s the jab, man. The. Jab. That needle heading inbound at their head is, for many patients, the very image which sets off their trip-hammering heart. Not nice.

Inhalation Sedation. Nitrous oxide/oxygen is a great deal of fun at frat parties, sure. It has its place in our surgeries, also, after the light-headedness and giggles give way to euphoria and sleepiness. Improperly administered, though, adverse effects can range from vertigo and nausea, through active vomiting to hallucinations and unexpected flash-backs (and couldn’t we expect that to bring on driver lawsuits, were the fact widely known).

Intravenous General Anesthesia. Voila! The Cadillac of the comatose. An intravenous (IV) catheter is inserted into a vein and from there, an infinitely-controllable amount of anesthetic happiness is introduced. Just a few good drips and the patient is in a safe state of unconsciousness, allowing the professionals to get to work without any major side effects after all procedures are said and done. To the patient’s benefit, there’s no sensation of pain at all, and no memory exists afterward of the entire time he or she was “under.” More and more practices are looking to this form of sedation as being their one and only form because it’s just that safe, comforting, and effective. For example, Advance Dentistry, a well-known practice in Cincinnati, has found that IV sedation helps the dentist because it reduces the risk of movement, and it provides maximum comfort (or minimal discomfort, I suppose) to the patient no matter how much work he or she may need done. It’s not uncommon to see IV sedation being their primary option for dental anesthesia. Furthermore, recovery from this form of anesthesia is typically swift and complete, with little or no “hangover” effect as one would see in the other forms listed earlier, so the patient’s free access to their credit card is seldom impacted.

We’ve come a long way since the early 19th century where anesthesia wasn’t even a thing in any surgical practices, much less dentistry. But thanks to Horace Wells first introducing nitrous oxide to his procedures back in 1845, we can honestly say that going to the dentist in today’s world really isn’t that scary of a thing. So look at your options when you go to the dentist and ask about other forms of sedation. It’s a far cry from “pass the liquor and bite down hard on this stick and let’s hope we don’t have to amputate anything from aftermath infection.”

Filed Under: Operative Dentistry Tagged With: IV Sedation Dentistry

How to talk to patients 101

December 6, 2013 By DentalBuzz Staff 4 Comments

dentistpatientcommunication
 
Have you ever wondered what kind of courses patients think you missed out on in college? They probably will never notice that you totally bombed the gold foil technique (neither will any dentist under 70, for that matter!). But they do wonder what you were taught about dealing with humans – the personal side, instead of the gushy clinical stuff.
Enter a bit of collegiate satire from a patient’s perspective. New DentalBuzz contributor Carolyn Roche has eight children and five grandchildren, a BA in Political Science from the University of Michigan, and is now studying English at Dixie State University in St. George, Utah where she lives with her husband, soon-to-be missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints daughter, and two dogs. She occasionally begins her day with Special K, and would like to share this delightful suggestive nudge with all dentists and hygienists practicing now and into the future.

Lecture Notes on Dentist-Patient Communication

by Carolyn Roche
 

Professor Samuel Rose
Algonac Dental School
For Tuesday October 15, 2013

Today’s lecture is about communicating with your patient. No one wants to be the Frank Burns of the dental industry. You want your patient to have confidence in your wisdom and know that you will work on them with compassion and competence. We will discuss some guidelines about how and why you should maintain rapport and communication with your patient.

Acceptable Subjects of Conversation

Before you begin chewing out your patient for not flossing, break the ice by conversing about the following:

1. The weather. You can always jaw about the weather. Your patient has just come in from outside and can give you valuable updates. It will help them feel helpful to you.

2. The family:

a. You can drill him about his family. People always like to talk about their family.

b. You may talk about yours. You can forget about what Thumper said, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” It’s best to be honest with the patient or he won’t believe anything else you say. Tell him all the good and the bad about your family. Being open will encourage him to trust you as an honest person and like you as well. No one likes a goody-goody.

3. Recent acceptable news.

a. Crime. The patient will be happy to know which side of the law you are on. Always root for the good guy even though the bad guy is your brother. This could be another chance to talk about your family! Include all the crime details.

b. The economy. Let them know how much you earn and how much you have stashed away in safe investments. You will want to make an impression on them. Then make sure they pay the bill.

c. Medical news – if it throws a good light on professionals. If you have botched up anything recently, the patient will want to know the truth from the false rumors. Speak of your mistakes in detail. It’s okay to show off your knowledge. The patient will respect you more.

4. Remember to not get too personal with them. Forget the nonsense about building bridges to your patients. All patients should remain anonymous to you. You will be filling cavities for the rest of your life and to make YOU feel comfortable, think that they are just another cavity or tooth extraction. You will be less nervous and your patient will be less whiney. Once you get personal they will think they can complain about the pain. You don’t need that. It just wastes time.

How to Speak to Your Patient

However awkward, you must speak to the patient while you are working on them. Speaking to the patient with their mouth full is medically necessary. Make sure you have, at the least, the Hoover and a finger and a tool in their mouth.

1. Ask yes or no questions. A nod or a grunt means you haven’t frightened them enough to make them faint. Keep trying. Don’t mistake closed eyes for a faint; they are praying. There are no atheists in dentists’ chairs.

2. Ask questions that require a full sentence answer.

a. You can determine how frozen their mouth really is. If you can understand them, additional anesthetic may be required.

b. You can sue the patient for biting you. Dentistry can be an altruistic career, but remember your $1,500,000 in student loans need to be paid off before your children begin college.

After you have inflicted as much pain as possible, needle the patient about brushing and flossing. With the pain fresh in his mind he will be more likely to follow your recommendations. When you use these methods you will be filling your patients with tremendous motivation to have the healthiest teeth possible.

If You Need Help:

One of the great benefits of attending the Algonac Dental School is the support we offer to alumni opening their own practices. For a nominal fee of $500 –plus airfare, food, and accommodations- my staff and I will fly out and assess your new practice. We will help you streamline your operation. You won’t waste a moment in a day’s work after following our advice. For only $500 more, you can have the full, written report of our analysis and recommendations. NO OTHER dental school will offer this service! Call now for a FREE ESTIMATE 1-800-555-ROSE.

+++(Copy and hand out to students at end of class.)

Filed Under: Anecdotes, Fun, Uncategorized

Gold refining update

October 30, 2013 By DentalBuzz Staff Leave a Comment

by Morgan Kerrissey, VP of Business Development at Garfield Refining Company

Way back in 2010 DentalBuzz was in its groove, dishing on Garfield, spotting trends and staying ahead of the curve. Fast forward three years and some of those trends now seem a wee bit dated– look at Lady Gaga and her Twilight inspired grill! — while other trends have only surged in popularity. Since that first blog post the already popular Patient Bling Program** exploded with another 10,000 doctors enrolling. For those of you not already in the know, the program is offered by Garfield Refining Company and is known to them as their Patient Scrap Program (**Fun people still prefer the Dentalbuzz rebranded name!).

Garfield offers prepaid mailers that you can distribute to your patients so they can deal directly with a precious metals refinery. It doesn’t cost anything, Garfield handles all the paperwork, and best of all you earn a 10% rebate. It’s like free money. Plus this year they have added some new features, allowing doctors to customize their payment schedules, be paid in coins or bullion, and receive better email reporting. It’s a win/win: patients love the opportunity to sell their old crowns and doctors love the opportunity to give their patients a small perk.

So once again, if you haven’t already, click here to enroll.

 

Filed Under: Products Tagged With: dental gold, Garfield Refining Company, gold scrap

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Next Page »

About

DentalBuzz explores rising trends in dentistry with its own slant. The speed at which new products and ideas enter the dental field can often outpace our ability to understand just exactly the direction in which we are heading. But somehow, by being a little less serious about dentistry and dental care, we might get closer to making sense of it all.

So yeah, a tongue-in-cheek pun would fit really nicely here, but that would be in bad taste. Never mind, it just happened anyways. Stop reading sidebars already and click on some content instead.

Recent Posts

  • Dry Humor, Wet Biofilm: A DentalBuzz Look at Periodontal Desiccation Therapy
  • Are affordable online nightguards any good?
  • CareCredit: The Easy Way Billionaire Banks Fill Cavities in Their Profits
  • Off-Label and Totally Legal: What the FDA Won’t Say About Fluoride Varnish & SDF
  • Dentists Rejoice over the Leica Camera Tariffs
  • It’s not OK for your dental practice to use free cloud-based communication
  • Patients ask, “Is it safe to go back to the dentist?”
  • Free “return to work guide” from the American Dental Association
  • Why COVID-19 increases your need for contactless payments
  • A virtual care package from worried dental hygienists
  • Lead Aprons feel so good! Here’s why.
  • What is this $&!% on my toothbrush?

Article Archives

Contact Us

Guest columnists are welcome to submit edgy stories that cover new ground (no regurgitations, please!) , or if there's a topic that you'd like to see explored please punch in your best stuff here and see if it ends up sticking to the website.

Follow DentalBuzz on Social Media

  • Facebook
  • Instagram

DentalBuzz Copyright ©2008-2026 • bluenotesoftware.com • All Rights Reserved