Hello, Dr. Jeff Johnston here coming to you from Denver, Colorado. I wanted to talk to you about the industry progresses we’ve seen when it comes to the age of bonding. Meaning, most everything we do is held by a chemical bond. And the importance of that is that now isolation is becoming very important. The gold standard of isolation is what you call, the rubber dam. It’s not very comfortable and it’s a little bit cumbersome to put on. Endodontist or root canal specialists are still using it as their standard of care. You have to keep the tooth away from any saliva or bacterial contamination while you are working on it. This allows us to keep the tooth dry and get a good bond, things of that nature.
For things that we do at Ascent Dental Group in Cherry Creek, CO, this new invention has come out in the last 5- 6 years and it’s called an isolite. An isolite is a little suction device made of real plastic material and has ports that can suction. It’s basically a 3 in 1 system that we’ve found to be really comfortable for patients. It has a little bite pillow that you bite on so you don’t have to worry about staying in open. It retracts your tongue and cheek so it protects that from any kind of dangers of the drill or your tongue is moving around. It also gives us a light and it provides suction so that one single dentist can complete the procedure. You’re not going to swallow water or choke or anything because all of the suction is taken care of. We’re finding patients are really finding this comfortable. We’ve done away with all of the cotton and gauze and the things we’re putting in your mouth to keep things really dry. This is allowing us to bond with real dry fields, giving us really good long-lasting results and bond strengths. The rubber dam has been around for a really long time, it is our gold standard of isolation but this new device has come along and we’re really excited. I love using this thing, it has changed how I practice dentistry and I find it really comfortable. I’ve had some work done with it and it was really nice to just there and relax and not worry about being open or having stuff shoved in my mouth.
I wanted to share that with you, we’ve been using this probably 8-9 months now, and it’s just made everybody’s life a lot better.