NOYB wrote:


Speaking of awesome, I was at my friend the dentist's office the other
day, and he showed me a milling machine that makes crowns right in his
office, and some other neat new stuff.

CEREC. It's cool technology, but there are some limitations with it.

It's not capable of making a crown as esthetic as a lab-fabricated
one...unless you do your own in-office porcelain staining. Then you end up
doing lab work instead of income-producing tasks like seeing additional
patients.

It also costs $100k...or $2000/mo. for 60 months. You'd have to do 17
single unit crowns/mo. just to break even (assuming your lab bill for
lab-fabricated crowns runs about $125/unit). Those 17 crowns don't include
bridges because the CEREC cannot do bridges yet. And it doesn't include
veneers or anterior (front teeth) crowns (unless you're staining them
in-office as mentioned before).

It's gee-whiz technology at this point, useful mostly for the "wow" factor.
They try to tell the dentists that it will make us more profitable, but the
ROI just isn't there IMO.

Cool A small CNC machining center in a dentists office. Who would
have imagined such a thing just 5 years ago!