The indefatigable spirit of Thomas Edison also resides in our annual overview, in alphabetical order, of 10 of the finest new dental products to hit the market in the previous year.

By Edward Kobesky and Sean Mickalitis

Activa Presto

PULPDENT

Cavities are an ugly, dark infiltration of bacteria into the pearly whites of unsuspecting molars. They are the bane of teeth everywhere. Fight back with Activa Presto, a universal stackable composite and light cure.

Activa Presto’s moisture-friendly, rubberized resin mimics that of natural teeth. No cavity will be safe! It absorbs stress, resists wear, repels fractures and averts chips. Use the 1.2-milliliter syringe to easily reach and fill tooth structures for margin-free adaptation. The composite facilitates diffusion of bioavailable calcium, phosphate and fluoride ions.

Once it’s cured and polished, the composite holds its shape. How realistic is it, meanwhile? You might have a bit of difficulty afterward discerning the real tooth from Activa Presto. Use it to restore what cavities stole: Return smiles from the dark side back to white.

Amber Mill

HASS

The beautifully crystalline, exceedingly easy-to-use Amber Mill offers doctors something in glass-ceramic dental blocks that are second only to real teeth. It has won an IE Award—and this year it’s also a nominee for an Edison.

mora system

HERMAN MILLER

It’s hard to decide whether design or build quality is the most impressive feature of Herman Miller’s Mora System of health-care cabinetry. Yes, system: Mora is a beautiful, intuitive tool for human-centric organizing (see “Less Is Mora,” Incisal Edge, Winter 2020), but it’s also crafted to meet the high standards you’d expect of a product backed by the iconic manufacturer’s no-fine-print, 12-year parts-and-labor warranty.

From a design standpoint, Mora isn’t just attractive—it’s a smart storage solution that puts people first, clearing clutter from surfaces and thereby giving you more time to enhance your relationship with patients. Its elegant looks work hard, too, seamlessly blending with a variety of health-care furnishings and environments through its broad range of options.

It’s not just for the operatory, either: Installing Mora throughout your practice, from the reception area to the break room, creates visual and functional unity that soothes and enhances productivity. Because it’s modular, you can easily change configurations at any time, adding or removing storage as needed. On the build side, it’s engineered for high performance and made with environmentally friendly materials. Best of all, Mora is Herman Miller’s most accessibly priced health-care system, so elite design and craftsmanship is now within reach for more practices than ever.

nano

95LS ELECTRIC HANDPIECE

A revolution in the handpiece market, reflective of the fact that ever-greater numbers of dentists now are women—and this year, in addition to being a winner of an IE Award, is a nominee for an Edison.

Natural Extensions

NITRILE AIR

BENCO DENTAL

With some gloves, it’s hard to shake the sensation that you’re wearing them. Although we’ll probably never reach a point where it feels like you’ve got nothing at all on your hands, the combination of leading-edge manufacturing techniques and advanced materials can at least make the best gloves feel like they’re almost not there.

Nitrile gloves in particular strike the ideal balance between latex and vinyl. They feel and flex like latex, but they’re tougher and stronger. New Natural Extensions Nitrile Air gloves are the highest-tech exam glove ever added to the Natural Extensions lineup, employing state-of-the-art production for an optimal balance of material thinness and effective protection. As a result, you get superb stretch and tactile sensitivity in a glove that feels more like an extension of your own skin. They also feature textured fingertips for improved grip. Powder-free, they’re available in boxes of 300 in sizes from extra small to large.

Omnichroma

TOKUYAMA DENTAL

By now, you’ve heard of this single-shade composite that matches from A1 to D4 in just one application. What you might not fully appreciate is how it manages that—and that’s the genius part. Omnichroma isn’t a shade. In place of a pigment, Tokuyama employs spherical fillers the exact size and shape necessary to generate red-to-yellow color as ambient light passes through the composite. Combined with the reflected color of the patient’s surrounding dentition, it creates the perfect match.

When used as directed, then, it’s impossible to shade-match incorrectly. Omnichroma is all colors—and no colors—at the same time. (Heavy, man.) It simply “grabs” whatever color is around it. And a match today is a match tomorrow, next month and next year. If a tooth gets stained or whitened over time, it doesn’t matter; Omnichroma will simply snag whatever color is nearby. Now you can replace shades you seldom use to eliminate waste, and you no longer need to work with products near the end of their shelf life, when they’re long past peak performance. It also manages to retain the excellent handling Tokuyama is known for. While it doesn’t make all other products obsolete, doctors now have to ask which of those they can replace with Omnichroma.

Panavia

SA CEMENT UNIVERSAL

KURARAY

Do you want to save time? For instance, when you’re in the shower, you could separately condition and shampoo your hair—or you could use a product that saves time and adds minutes to your life. Would you like to skip a step when, say, placing a crown?

Now you can, with the innovative Panavia SA Cement Universal self-adhesive. It confidently bonds to prosthetic restorations like zirconia, lithium disilicate, porcelain, composite resin and metal (precious and noble), with no primer required.

Thanks to its LCSI (long carbon-chain silane coupling agent) monomer, the cement adheres to nearly every material. The MDP monomer, found in Panavia’s original adhesive, is in this paste as well—one of the only adhesives that binds to zirconia, dentin and enamel. The self-adhesive resin is available in auto-mix and hand-mix options. It’s easy to apply and remove excess cement, too—saving you time when you need it most. It’s not shampoo plus conditioner in one, maybe—but you’ll surely value it all the more during the post-shower workday.

Pro-Sys

INTRAORAL CAMERA

BENCO DENTAL

Drop that wooden depressor! We’re in the age of technology, for Pete’s sake—so improve your dental examinations with the PRO-SYS Intraoral Camera. The easy-to-use, lightweight device gives you a 40-millimeter depth of field to find and view tiny caries that might otherwise go unnoticed. Six diodes illuminate your patient’s mouth and display it on your operatory monitor; it easily connects to your computer using a simple USB connection.

Show and educate your patients about what’s going on in there with clear 1.3-megapixel resolution. The camera is compatible with all major imaging software and even includes a driver download to capture images for comparative analysis.

The Pro-Sys camera is small, too, taking up less than six square inches of your precious space, yet it vastly improves your ability to help patients with its fixed 90-degree-angle lens. It’ll help you show your patients what you see—and bring your practice deep into the twenty-first century as it does.

Sterling

PEN LASER

BENCO DENTAL

Perform more procedures in less time and with better results than traditional methods. This tiny powerhouse weighs in at just 1.9 ounces but delivers heavyweight practice-building benefits. The Sterling Pen Laser is an entirely plug-and-play system with 12 preset pro­cedures for all of your periodontal, restorative and orthodontic needs. It coagulates and cauterizes the treatment area for immediate hemostasis, fast healing and reduced swelling.

Portable and highly maneuverable, it easily goes where you go and lasts for 30 minutes of continuous operation at 1.2 watts—enough for more than 15 procedures before changing batteries. You can perform laser troughing, Class V restorations, recontouring, frenectomies, gingivectomies, hyperplasia, implant recovery and lesion destruction, plus add hygiene and special applications like LBR, cuspid exposure and operculectomy.

Your patients will benefit from a higher standard of care, experiencing faster treatment with less overall discomfort. Your practice will benefit, because you can move a patient directly from a hygiene procedure to a same-day restorative case with no wait time. Sterling is safe around implants and metal, and generally requires no topical anesthesia. CDT coding is straightforward for laser procedures, with fees ranging from $50 for simple procedures like desensitization to $450 for frenectomies. The benefits are clear—and Sterling is the answer for adding more same-day dentistry and incremental revenue to your practice, easily and cost-effectively.

vivos system

VIVOS

We all need a hero, and with the Vivos System, you could be the dentist who makes a difference in a certain patient’s life. In the United States, an estimated 54 million people suffer from sleep-disordered breathing, including obstructive sleep apnea. The Vivos System provides a unique approach to this increasingly problematic health issue—a method that has a potential permanent solution. Uniquely, the non-invasive, non- pharmaceutical, multidisciplinary treatment may not require lifetime care.

Using a proprietary treatment protocol consisting of oral appliance therapy, Vivos may significantly lower Apnea-Hypopnea Index scores and improve other conditions associated with OSA. We believe it strengthens the soft and hard tissues in the airway. The average treatment is 18 to 24 months and works by promoting the growth and development of the craniofacial complex.

After treatment, most patients do not need to pursue other options; they can breathe and sleep comfortably again. Not only will you help your patients, you’ll also help yourself. Be a hero. Integrate the Vivos System into your practice, help patients open their airways—and boost your practice’s performance as you do.

Innovation Spotlight

How Dentistry Got Here:
Over the last three decades, composites have gotten better in terms of performance, but also harder to use. When light-cured materials are polymerized, they shrink. One method to reduce shrinkage and increase strength is to increase filler loading. Manufacturers have done just that, with one significant downside: The material becomes extremely viscous, almost like clay, difficult to dispense and hard to adapt to the walls of a preparation. Preheating not only makes it easier to extrude the material, it improves adaptation and provides faster and deeper polymerization. In addition, there’s less shrinkage stress in standard and bulk-fill materials, and maximal polymerization is unaf- fected by weak or strong light.

How It Works:
Just like an ordinary dispensing gun once the composite is heated. Simply insert the compule, and the Compex HD heats it to the desired temperature in just 30 or 50 seconds—less than one-third the time most stand-alone composite heaters require. Since it delivers about 100 heating cycles between charges, it’s always ready for use when you need it, with little downtime for recharging.

Why It’s Better:
Preheating and dispensing composites using two separate devices requires moving the compule from heater to gun, during which it immediately starts to cool. That forces the practitioner to work quite quickly. In addition, if another compule requires heating, that can add another three
or four minutes or more. Not to mention how much valuable real estate two devices take up. The patent-pending Compex HD solves all of those problems in one compact, easy-to-use device.

Why It’s Special:
AdDent, founded by Dr. Joshua Friedman, is a pioneer in preheating dental materials, having developed the patented Calset composite warmer in the 1990s. It’s also behind the highly regarded Co-Max dispenser gun, which many practitioners consider the best product of its type. AdDent’s forthcoming Compex HD, scheduled for release during the second quarter of this year, distills its considerable experience with separate warmers and guns into a single product.