I don’t know how it is in your practice, but sometimes patients just completely dumbfound me. This is especially true when a tooth is infected and the patient looks at me and says “can’t i just take an antibiotic?”
I typically go into a diatribe about how the antibiotic will just mask the symptoms and the patients eyes glaze over. Now I utilize my 3D imaging to better explain to the patient what is going on.
Mr. Jones comes to our office with a chief complaint of pain in the area of tooth #11. He had porcelain veneers completed (not at our office) several years ago.
A slice of tooth #11 shows a periapical lesion.
We advise Mr. Jones that the nerve inside his tooth has become infected and a root canal was necessary. He asked if he could get by just taking some antibiotics.
This time instead of going into my diatribe I decided to visually show him the urgency and importance of getting this taken care of.
In the 3D surface view above we can see that the lesion on tooth #11 has actually eaten a hole in his head. I put this image up on the patient viewing monitor and quickly explain what I am seeing. “Mr. Jones I am worried about this infection, it has already eaten a small hole in your head. If we don’t get this taken care it will continue to get worse.”
As you can imagine the patient moves forward with treatment!
So how do you get this ‘surface’ skull in the Sirona Galaxis software? Simple.
In the 3D view (upper right hand corner) right click and select surface mode.
