Say someone comes to our office with broken teeth, or worn teeth because they’ve ground their teeth for a long time in their life, or they may have had an accident or something, or it may just be someone who wants to see what their smile could look like. There’s a whole host of reasons they come. But we can do what’s called a diagnostic wax-up, where we take photographs of the patient. We take photographs of their teeth. We can take models, and we send that to the lab, and the lab can do what we call a diagnostic wax-up where we can see on the models what their teeth can look like. We’ll have the patient come back in, and we’ll make any adjustments that we need to to the wax, and let the patient see that.

We’re not guessing to what they’re going to get. If it’s like a full-mouth reconstruction, or if it’s someone who wants to close the gaps between their teeth, or from a cosmetic standpoint, or someone who has broken teeth, we know what we’re going to get. That helps the patient to visualize, helps me to visualize, and helps me to know what I have to do to accomplish what they want, and what they’re desiring, and what they need. And then the lab already knows because we’ve got a working model now, and they know exactly how to make it. So, those things really go hand in hand with us, the patients, and the lab working hand to hand together to accomplish that common goal and get the results that we desire.