WEEKEND COLUMNISTS Teeth can be a pain. And how. In adult life, I have been meticulous about going to the dentist for check-ups and have never been in dire physical pain on account of a tooth, although I had a few fillings when I was a teenager. I am English, of course, and grew up at a time when parents did not send their offspring routinely to the orthodontist. (My children, by contrast, have been or will go – Cost Centre #1 has a dazzling smile that cost £2,500.) So, while I am a bit self-conscious about my smile on aesthetic grounds, I have not been worried about its health.
Then this year I cracked a very old filling, quite badly, and I thought I was going to need to have the tooth crowned. Groan. I am not good at spending time out of the office and I could see that this was going to need two visits. On the first, I knew I would have an injection of anaesthetic, the dodgy filling would be removed and the cavity cleaned, an impression taken, and a temporary restoration put on. A dental technician in a lab somewhere would make the crown, and I would return about two weeks later to have another injection, so that the temporary fix could be prised off (if it hadn’t fallen out already) and the permanent one fitted.
This is especially bad when you consider that I have a phobia of needles. Years ago, when having an amniocentesis for CC#2 in Hong Kong, the doctor produced the biggest needle I had ever seen. I was off the consulting bed and down the hall before he could say “lie still please”. After the nurse and Mr M had persuaded me to return, the doctor looked at my robust frame and said: “You had better get used to needles – or lose weight. You are almost certainly going to end up diabetic.” What a delightful man.
So, the prospects of two visits and two injections did not fill me with enthusiasm. But as it turned out I needn’t have worried – the dentist told me that it would only require one visit, one injection and no technicians. I was talking to the dentist of the future. He told me he was going to remove the cracked filling and clean the cavity out but then, instead of putting in a temporary fix, he was going to photograph the cavity using a 3D camera, play around with the image on a screen to refine the shape using something that looked like CAD software, and then mill the required filling immediately – in the next room, using an industrial-diamond-tipped, computer-driven tool. While this was going on, for just 15 minutes or so, I would put my feet up and read Hello!
It turns out that this process was invented nearly 30 years ago by some enterprising folk at the University of Zurich, and the technology is called Cerec. This is an acronym for Chairside Economical Restoration of Esthetic Ceramics. (No wonder they don’t use its full name. And is “esthetic” a real word?)
Siemens acquired the licence to develop and manufacture the equipment in 1986, and then in 1997 its dental division was sold to a private equity-backed buyout and renamed Sirona. After a reverse takeover in 2006 of a US “intra-oral radiographic imaging specialist” (who dreams up these descriptions?), Sirona acquired a listing on Nasdaq. The company even has a female finance director, Simone Blank, who is smiling on the website, her gleaming white teeth on display. And she is not American – she is German!
I have been registered with my dentist since 1998, when he was young and single and keen to push the frontiers of dentistry. He is now married with children, but still keen on those frontiers, and he is one of the few dentists in the UK to have had a Cerec machine (and several versions thereof) almost from the beginning. From a lab bench in Zurich to a market town in South Oxfordshire – and now the world. Innovation is wonderful, isn’t it?
