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BrytonPick: Stainless Steel Cleaning Blades

August 26, 2008 By Trish Walraven 9 Comments

In so many ways, the BrytonPick is the best all-around new product in patient oral health care. 

 

It’s Green: One pick is reusable for up to 30 days.

It’s Cute: The BrytonPick looks like a little boomerang.

It’s Practical: Patients who absolutely will not use dental floss will be thrilled that a new option is available for food removal. This means they can stop using paper clips, business cards, matches, and fingernails.

It’s Portable: the BrytonPick comes with a credit card-sized carrying case.

It’s Brandable: the back of the carrying case can be printed with the name of your dental practice.

It’s Affordable: BrytonPicks each cost less than $2.

 

There’s only one problem: It’s made of metal, which makes it hard to watch the video on the BrytonPick website without getting that watery-mouth, galvanic shock sympathy shudder.

 

Filed Under: Preventive Care, Products Tagged With: BrytonPick, flossing

Chairside iPhone modding

July 30, 2008 By Trish Walraven Leave a Comment

Seriously tweaked patients are bringing their iPhone accessories to dentists nationwide.

 

The newest iPhone almost fits in the original iPhone dock. Almost, but… no.  And MobileMe still doesn’t sync iTunes remotely, so users are either stuck with purchasing the 3G dock for $29 or sticking it to Apple by creatively finding ways to carve out the plastic edges of their old ones.

Desperate for something to drill on, dentists affected by the recent economic downturn have begun aiming their burs outside of their patients’ mouths and are now the prime facilitators of this dock modding craze.

The unnamed dentist pictured above performed the service as part of a “teeth fixin” deal. He is now questioning his decision to allow photography during the modification due to the large number of geeks currently hanging out in his reception area.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Fun, Products, Technology Tagged With: dental handpiece, iPhone

STA, OraVerse, or GumEase (oh my)

July 7, 2008 By Trish Walraven 5 Comments

For a moment, imagine that this is one of the forms your patients fill out at an initial visit:


Anesthesia Options

We understand that each person has unique concerns when it comes to pain management, and would like to give our patients the opportunity to explore all of the anesthetic techniques available in our modern practice. Please read the following paragraphs and make a checkmark next to the one that best describes and addresses your needs:

1.  Please do not get a needle anywhere near me. You can numb my face with a sledgehammer, but you’d better not even let me see the tip of an etchant syringe or I’ll flip. Pain is preferable to an injection in my case. I will be willing to try electroshock treatment or even a couple of frozen teething rings wedged under my lips, but definitely no shots. With your delicate situation, we have a dental TENS unit available. Two electrodes will be placed in opposite areas of your mouth. We will then run a current of electricity that will fry your noodles allow a fair amount of pain management. Your hand signals will help us control the frequency of the current. TENS feels very similar to sticking your finger in a light socket.   Our other non-sharp alternative is called the GumEase, which is a frozen saline-filled ring that numbs the teeth at the roots. If you are not cold sensitive, cryoanesthesia is better than nothing. And it’s warmer than ice cream.

 

2.  I am okay with injections, but I don’t want to feel anything. Ever.I will do best with relaxation, especially if nitrous oxide sedation is part of the trip, and then you can very, very gently and slowly do what you must. When Dorothy got sight of Glenda’s wand, her ride somewhere over the rainbow was…over. Please use the Wand on me, but make sure that I never see it. We’re not supposed to call it that anymore; the official name for this single tooth anesthesia method from Milestone Scientific is the STA System™. Other dentists may momentarily zing you good with the Henke Sass Wolf  Ligmaject  when they are administering intraligamentary anesthesia, but you’ll find that the STA System is careful and precise. Additionally, the passage of time will seem like nothing as you float off into the happy clouds of laughing gas.

 

3.  I like having my cheek shaked and pulled. It takes my mind off of the needle and back to the golden days of dentistry. Oh, to be a kid again. Because of the inherent post-injection trauma associated with slapping a cheek around like a piece of wet ham, our preference instead is to snap on the VibraJect analgesic syringe clip. You’ll enjoy five times the wiggling in only a quarter of the space.

 

4.  The dental visits had better not interfere with my day because I am a very busy person. Needles are fine, a little pain is okay too. Most importantly, my lip should not still feel like it’s on the floor, a la Bill Cosby, for more than an hour after the appointment. I would like something to make the numb feeling go away as fast as possible. If you can wait until October, 2008 for your dental treatment, OraVerse™, a new anesthetic reversal agent, will be available from the Novalar pharmaceutical company. This additional injection has been shown to accelerate the return to normal sensation and function. It only works if your original anesthetic shot contained the vasoconstrictor epinephrine, but it can pull out the anesthetic stops in less than 90 minutes following the administration of OraVerse.

No matter which method you prefer, the best way to administer anesthesia is always with a caring touch.

So for all you dentists who mail out postcards to potential patients, please don’t advertise that you’re gentle if you’re not. With all the options available, painful dentistry is pretty much inexcusable.

 

Filed Under: Operative Dentistry, Products Tagged With: Anesthesia, Dental Wand, GumEase, Ligmaject, OraVerse, STA system, TENS, VibraJect

Dental Design Rip-offs

June 22, 2008 By Trish Walraven Leave a Comment

Looking around your dental practice, you wonder where the ideas for all those gadgets came from. Do you need help uncluttering the deja-vu from your mind?

Run your mouse over the product images to get a sense of their origins.

 

 

Unfortunately, the Luxatemp guns do not fire over long distances. That and they’re kind of runny.

 

 

Make sure that you’ve placed the right kind of suction tip in your patient’s mouth.

 

 

Laser dentistry. So easy, even a toddler could do it.

 

 

Enamel Pro paste appeals to hygienists who never grew up. Oh, the colors that end up in our children’s stomachs! Thankfully patients aren’t supposed to swallow this.

 

 

Who says you have to sit still while doing dentistry? The Evolution Chair also provides for good spinal alignment.

 

 

Hey, with an LCD screen, you can find the bottom of anything! At least the Vector Root Apex Locator comes with its own hook.

 

 

Never mind.

Filed Under: Featured, Fun, Products Tagged With: Enamel Pro, Fun, Gaiam, Luxatemp, Oroscience, Vector

Keeping it clean

June 14, 2008 By Trish Walraven Leave a Comment


Throw away all your battery-powered unmentionables and welcome a familiar friend to your bedside drawer!

The Oral-B Pulsar disposable electric toothbrush is the discreet answer to better pleasure, vitality, and all-around good vibes.

Once found only in the oral care department of superstores, the Oral-B Pulsar has now been endorsed by a pioneering gynecologist and may soon be the first product on the market to simultaneously receive the ADA Seal of Acceptance and the ABOG Standard of Therapy Seal. “Never before have we realized that a single product can fulfill two needs – perhaps even at the same time if the spouse is an enthusiastic brusher,” said one dental hygienist who wishes to remain anonymous.

Furthermore, the low cost of the Oral-B Pulsar opens the door to many more users who could not otherwise afford a vibrating device or who would stoop so low as to think of handling a toothbrush in this manner.

Readers of this blog who want to be further humored are highly encouraged to first read this actual news article from the Palm Beach Post, then to go play with the Pulsar Flash Video on Oral-B’s website. It will definitely change the way you look at power toothbrushes forever.

Filed Under: Fun, Preventive Care, Products Tagged With: Electric toothbrush, Fun, Oral-B, Pulsar, vibrator

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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.

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