The Dawson Academy Blog

Lucia Jig or a Leaf Gauge? Which one is best? A couple of tools that have been used throughout the years to aid dentists in seeding the condyles and taking or recording a centric relation bite record in addition to bimanual manipulation or in conjunction with bimanual manipulation are the Lucia Jig and the Leaf Gauge.

The Golden Proportion of dentistry is a mathematical analysis tool for assessing the widths and the dominance of the maxillary anterior teeth. It is done from a frontal photographic view of the patient.

One of the most common reasons that dentists have to do a lot of adjustments on a new crown is failure to start their treatment with a complete examination and plan their treatment.

I often compare the experience of patients coming in to our office and being told that they need to have work done to the experience of us taking our car in to be serviced and they tell us that we need new brakes.

Any time that we're planning to work on multiple teeth on a patient, it's important to start with a complete exam and plan our treatment.

So one of the first things that is helpful is, of course, we want to check the point of initial contact in the mouth when we do our complete exam. And you might even want to go as far as, when you mark your point of initial contact with articulating paper to take an intraoral photo of it. And then when you have mounted your models, you want to go back to your models and the point of initial contact on the models should match the point of initial contact in the mouth.

So I want to talk today about a few ways that you can introduce patients into the complete exam in your practice. In our practice, we primarily have three doors that the patients can enter through.

Transcript continued below...

When I started my Dawson training and my Dawson journey when I started going through the curriculum, I was actually an associate in a group practice. So I wanted to give you a couple of tips about how you can go back to your practice, a non-Dawson practice where you are an associate, and begin to implement some of the things that you are learning at The Academy.

Some of you already have the T-Scan in your practice from Tekscan. It's a computerized bite sensor that you can use in initial exams to show patients some of their malocclusion. And one of my favorite uses in our practice is to use it as part of our equilibration.

So one of the things that I know that a lot of you are doing as good, complete dentists is actually doing afull contour wax-up, especially when we're doing an anterior case, a full arch reconstruction, or a full mouth reconstruction.

Something that's been very useful to us in helping to communicate with the patient and also be able to preview our results, is when we order the wax-up from the lab, we'll have the ceramist send us a vinyl impression of the wax-up.