Teaming up for Solutions

It's been said that tough times don't last, but tough people do. In the case of dentistry, you could say tough teams last. Dentistry often gets complicated, and it takes a collaborative effort, or a circle of team players, to overcome complex issues that patients often present with. To provide optimal treatment and patient outcomes, it is imperative for practitioners to come together as a dental team to communicate, build symmetry, and create successful solutions.

In this issue of Compendium, several articles highlight the importance of teamwork and collaboration in planning and delivering optimum care. The article featured on this month's cover is a prime example. It describes a complex case in which a patient had hopeless teeth adjacent to pre-existing implants and poor overall esthetics. The authors teamed up to diagnose, plan, and effectively execute a treatment that combined the innovative use of straight and subcrestal angle correction implants with hard- and soft-tissue augmentation and serial provisionalization. Although a challenging case, the practitioners delivered much-improved esthetics in the all-important anterior maxilla. This case is also featured in Compendium's "Complex Case Discussions," a series of CE webinars that give a behind-the-scenes look at the difficulties and benefits of collaborative care. Compendium readers can register for this particular event by visiting compendiumlive.com/go/cced1965.

Teamwork, along with a novel digital workflow, is also on display in our first CE article. The authors teamed up to present a unique concept for morphological and esthetic enhancement of monolithic ceramic restorations using digital dentistry. This approach, which utilizes CAD/CAM technology and a combination of different software programs, simplified the task of mimicking tooth anatomy, shape, and texture in a successful restoration of a severely discolored and periodontically compromised dentition.

Our second CE discusses retrograde peri-implantitis, or implant periapical lesions. While not terribly common, this inflammatory condition can be a factor in the survival of an implant. The author describes a diagnostic approach and therapeutic options, including surgical and nonsurgical.

Case reports in this issue include a digital cast-free approach to restoring a mandibular arch supported by six implants in a staged approach, and a method of achieving optimal isolation for reliable placement of an adhesive ceramic crown.

When cases get complex, communication, collaboration, and teamwork are essentials!

Sincerely,

Louis F. Rose, DDS, MD
Editor-in-Chief
lrose@aegiscomm.com