The Dawson Academy Blog

Digital photography is an integral part of my diagnosis and treatment planning. It is also an integral part of The Dawson Academy philosophy. Knowing how to introduce digital photography to your team will ensure that they will know how to properly take photos that can be used during the diagnosis and treatment planning stage.

Here at The Dawson Academy, we get a lot of questions. Among all of the questions I hear from our students, one of the main questions that we get is why is my dentistry breaking? And what can I do to prevent that from happening again?

Dental occlusion is the absolute backbone of everything that we do here at The Dawson Academy. Dental occlusion is important because it affects how the teeth react, how the muscles react, how the joint reacts.

Communicating with the lab is paramount to do successful, predictable dentistry.

It starts out with exquisite, accurate records on your part.

Occlusal equilibration basically is balancing up the bite to where the jaw joint is seated properly.

We always start with a healthy joint, making sure that it's seated properly, in Centric Relation, and then we want all the teeth to come together with equal pressure, and then when the jaw moves at all, just the front teeth touch.

Conservative dentistry, to me, is gathering all the information up that we can in a complete exam.

And once we have got a complete exam, doing the least amount of dentistry to solve that patient's problems.

We want to make sure that if it is just a couple of crowns and cleaning, then that is what we want to do. If the patient needs more functional or esthetic desires, then we can do that. But even on those levels, we are trying to do the very least amount of dentistry to solve all of their problems and what they need to do with that.

I explain the complete exam to the patient only after the preclinical interview. I interview the patient, ask them while they're here what they're looking for from me. And then from there, I simply tell them that I need to gather more information and records. And I explain to them all what we're doing. Checking their teeth out, periodontal health, but also we're going to look at their joints and their muscles.