The Dawson Academy Blog

Splints are more than just a piece of plastic you give to patients when you don't know what else to do with them

Occlusal splint therapy can be a great treatment option for those suffering from occluso-muscle disorders and TMD. Given the wrong type of appliance, however, splint therapy can actually do more harm than good for our patients. With an improper or poorly fabricated device, patients can develop increased pain to the joint, an open bite and other serious implications.

Occlusal equilibration is a treatment modality that we can use to increase patient satisfaction and comfort. Prior to my training and education at The Dawson Academy, equilibration was the least understood and therefore the most underutilized procedure of all the things that I did.

WIDIOM is the Dawson Academy acronym for Would I Do It On Me.

I think of it kind of like the modern-day golden rule. It's how I live my life. It's how I treat my patients. It's how I treat my family. I think about every single thing that I do with the idea of, is this what I would want somebody else to be doing or suggesting to me?

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My quick tip today is on general versus specialty patients.

A general patient is defined as...

a patient where the size, contour, and position of the teeth are working for the patient. There's no instability, no signs of wear, no discomfort.

A specialty patient is...

a patient where the size, contour, and position of the teeth are not working for the patient. They have worn teeth, muscle pain, joint pain, and just general discomfort - headaches, things like that.

Following proper diagnosis and treatment planning, occlusal equilibration can provide selected patients with the most conservative, predictable and safest treatment possible.

Occlusal equilibration can often help avoid the need for more complex treatments. Dentists who have developed proficiency in equilibration universally agree it is one of the most practical skills they use routinely in practice.

Hello everybody. For this quick tip, I want to talk a little bit about how we choose different restorative materials and align them with our patients. I want to share with you this grid that we came up with a number of years ago that assesses esthetic risk with functional risk.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Quick Tips. In this edition, we're going to be talking about customizing your patient's envelope of function, which is a very important part of getting the anterior guidance right for your patients.

As you're looking at the lingual contour of provisional restorations, hopefully you are developing lines on your provisionals that provide evidence of posterior disclusion or anterior guidance.

Remember, if you don't get anterior guidance or posterior disclusion, then that is going to allow the back teeth to rub.

And if the back teeth rub, then we know that increases muscle activity and can create damage to the teeth, either by working them loose or by causing the teeth to wear. And make no mistake, a lot of the fractures we see are related to not having good anterior guidance or posterior disclusion.

But the question is, can we make the guidance too steep? 

When the patient starts chewing and speaking and the mandible starts moving outside-in, is it possible to get those lines too steep so it's actually in the way of the functional path that the lower incisors travel outside-in?

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Can you imagine building an expensive home or a complicated remodeling project without accurate measurements or plans? Unfortunately everyday our dental laboratories are asked to fabricate restorations with inaccurate records.

I spoke with lab technician extraordinaire, Walt Richardson CDT from Bay View Dental Laboratory to add a lab’s perspective to my 34 years of dental experience.

Dr. Dawson receives emails and letters from clinicians all over the world asking questions and looking for clarification on all matters of Functional Occlusion and challenges in dentistry. 

From: A Dentist in Canada
Subject: Long Centric

Explanation of "Long Centric"

Assumption: Dawson centric relation is valid beyond a shadow of a doubt.  My 37 years of successful clinical experience validates the truth of this assumption.