One of the most popular products we have in the laboratory is our Silent Nite^® appliance. It is a mandibular repositioning device that stops snoring in over 75% of patients who wear it. By anteriorizing the mandible, the tongue and its related muscles are moved anteriorly as well, opening the airway, causing the snoring to stop. I recently turned 40 and started snoring for the first time in my life, and after a week of learning to sleep with it in, I have now joined the ranks of the non-snorers again!

I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Michael Alvarez, a longtime Glidewell client who has done many Silent Nite appliances over the years, about how he got started in this area of dentistry, and where he sees it heading in the future. He got me excited about sleep dentistry as a growth center, and my hope is that Glidewell can continue to play a role in introducing this side of dentistry to more practitioners.

In our first issue, I wrote an article on no-prep veneers, and we are following it up with a comprehensive photo essay on more traditional veneers. Many times the veneer cases we see in the lab don’t look as good as they could because there was not enough reduction done in the right areas. In this piece, I want to demonstrate how I use pre-contouring and depth cuts to assure that I give my dental technician enough reduction to work his magic.

I also wrote an article regarding proper bite registrations. One of the more common problems we see in the lab is bite registrations that have not been done properly. As we all know, there is nothing worse than having a restoration fit beautifully, except for needing to have all of the anatomy ground down to balance the occlusion.

For this issue of Chairside^®, I also wrote an article on one of our newest products, Prismatik Clinical Zirconia™. If you have been reading dental journals recently, you no doubt have seen all the advertisements for products like DENTSPLY’s Cercon^® and 3M/ESPE’s Lava™ crowns and bridges. In the past three years I have placed hundreds of these restorations, and I am sold on the strength of these all-ceramic restorations. By fabricating Clinical Zirconia in our own digital manufacturing department, we are able to bring one thing to the zirconia market that has so far been missing: affordability. Look for our Glidewell Portrait on Mervyn Rudgley, our vice president of digital manufacturing technology.

We hope you find the magazine useful in your practice. We welcome your feedback. If you have comments or questions, email us at chairside@glidewelldental.com. We will be featuring your comments in future issues.