April 2025 DE Pearls for Your Practice

Xpanders by ArtCraft Dental

I don’t take out a lot of teeth in my practice. It’s not that I don’t like oral surgery; it’s just that generally my patients have a better experience at the oral surgeon where they can select a sedation/anesthesia plan that works best for them. However, occasionally we have an emergency where I have to get a tooth out. It happened a couple of days ago. A patient of record called with pain around an old endo-treated maxillary first molar. The exam revealed that it had a crack down the distal root and was unrestorable. Heck, it was even mobile! I thought, “Oh, this should be an easy one,” and decided to take it out myself. Thirty minutes later, I had broken the crown off and was fighting to try to get any piece of the tooth out. Thankfully, my assistant remembered I had recently ordered Xpanders by ArtCraft Dental. Five minutes later, I was packing the socket with gauze and saying goodbye to the patient. Xpanders made it so much easier! Xpanders are the most atraumatic dental elevators I have ever used. With just a small amount of penetration into the PDL space, I was able to get maximum lateral tooth movement. Once I got the roots sectioned and moving, they became much simpler to get out. The ability to basically get inside the ligament space to elevate made the physics of getting the tooth out much easier.

Each Xpander has a double--pronged, diamond-coated working end that grabs the root for a stable two-point contact between the crestal bone and the cervical aspect of the root. A simple twist allows for one point to lock onto the bone while the other point pushes the root laterally. The buccolingual socket expansion makes it much easier to grab the root with forceps or rongeurs.

The Xpanders kit comes with four different models of elevators. The anterior set comes with a straight elevator and a curved elevator. The straight elevator works great for canines and incisors. The curved elevator works best for premolars. The curve lets the operator position the handle slightly farther away from the patient’s face, giving more freedom of movement. The posterior set of Xpanders has an “In” and “Out” model. The different angulations on these allow the operator to better get to different areas of sectioned molar teeth.

Every general dentist needs to be able to get a tooth out in an emergency. Even if you don’t do extractions often, tools like the Xpanders to make extractions easier are great to have in your back pocket. Triple into the right center field power alley for
ArtCraft Dental!

Bluephase EasyCure by Ivoclar

A few weeks ago, I was doing something that I should have known better than to do. I was browsing one of those dental Facebook groups. Bad idea. They are almost always terrible and full of maddening posts. One that fired up my cockles had to do with curing lights. A dentist was lamenting that one of their dental assistants had dropped one of their brand-name curing lights and broken it. Because of this frustration, they were planning on just ordering “cheap $50 curing lights from China,” so “if one breaks, we can just throw it away and get a new one.” My blood pressure rose to around 210/130. I almost had to call a medical emergency on myself. This is not the way. Please, do not follow this dentist’s plan. I understand the need to save some money, but there are better ways. Everything we do in modern adhesive dentistry relies on the curing light. Get a good one and ride with it! A really good one doesn’t have to break the bank either. The Bluephase EasyCure by Ivoclar proves that.

The Bluephase EasyCure light is Ivoclar’s newest curing light. It focuses on great performance and an even better price point, especially for its quality. With an output of 1,200 mw/cm2 of power, this curing light can cure any cement or resin on the market well. It uses Ivoclar’s “Polywave” light source, so in addition to having high-output power, it also has a broad spectrum of cure. With its simple one-button, one-mode curing system, you can fully cure cement or an increment of resin composite in 10 seconds.

Simplicity and value are key with the Bluephase EasyCure. With only one high-power output mode and only one button, there’s no pushing the wrong button by mistake. This has happened to me with some of my other curing lights. One wrong button and I am in some weird mode that I don’t know how to get out of. I just want to cure a crown and yet I am having to hold buttons down, google instruction manuals, and wave the dang thing around like I’m Harry Potter. The Bluephase EasyCure just cures! At less than $1,000, I can’t find a better value curing light on the market. The Bluephase EasyCure does exactly what you need it to do: cure cement and resin. And it does so in a quality product for an amazing price point from a company you can trust. It’s hard to beat that! Double to left center field for Ivoclar!

Midas by Sprintray

Revolutions in dentistry are somewhat rare. They happen, but they don’t happen every day or even every year. I remember the same-day dentistry revolution that occurred somewhere around 2010. CAD-CAM technology had been around dentistry for a long time before that, but it was the right confluence of technology, materials, and dentists being ready to incorporate it for everything to explode. Same-day dentistry became and remains a big deal for dentists and patients, but we’ve been stuck in a milling world for that. We are ready for a new revolution in same-day dentistry, this time with 3D printing. The Midas by Sprintray is the technology that will make that explosion happen.

Midas is an entirely new printing technology created by Sprintray. Midas is designed for chairside 3D printing of dental restorations and is the first application ever of digital pressed stereolithography. Using this new technology, it can create ceramic composite restorations in less than 10 minutes. Midas runs off cartridges of viscous composites that are pressed and shaped to a computer-aided design. Each cartridge can print around one crown or large onlay, two inlays or smaller onlays, or three veneers in about 10 minutes. Midas can print three cartridges at a time. In a maximized capacity, Midas can print nine veneers in less than 10 minutes (three per cartridge). Unbelievable!

Starting with an intraoral scan, it is imported into Sprintray’s design software, Sprintray Studio. This software uses AI to design a restoration once you mark the finish line. The file is then sent to Midas to be printed from one of the cartridges. Once printed, the restorations are removed from their build platform and postprocessed. Generally, this will involve some sort of alcohol spray to remove excess and a postprocessing cure. Once finished, the restorations can be bonded in.

Midas brings a new technology—hydrodynamic, pressed 3D printing—to dentistry. It will take some time to fully realize the power this technology can harness. The ability to use an additive technology like 3D printing to create up to nine restorations in less than 10 minutes is something milling cannot even do. As workflows are refined, this will only become more powerful. I mostly roll my eyes when I hear that something is a “game changer” for dentistry. We hear it a lot about things that wouldn’t even change a single play, much less the whole game. Midas has the potential to be an actual game changer for same-day dentistry. Are we on the cusp of a revolution? Only time will tell, but I think Midas is setting us up for that very real possibility. Solo home run to center field for Sprintray! 

Editor's note: This article appeared in the April 2025 print edition of Dental Economics magazine. Dentists in North America are eligible for a complimentary print subscription. Sign up here.