Wellness Dentistry by Dr. Dana Rockey DMD

My passion and focus is on health and wellness - helping patients to achieve and maintain health, rather than simply reacting/responding to disease. That focus is combined with an oral-systemic discipline to patient care.

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As a leader in the dental and healthcare industry, Dr. Rockey has continually embraced and invested in leading technology that improves outcomes for patients. Technology in itself does not deliver it’s promise unless it is used by highly trained and skilled experts like Dr. Rockey and his team.  

One of the technologies that has significantly improved the standard of dental care and convenience for patients is CEREC Technology (Chairside Economical Restoration of Esthetic Ceramics, or CEramic REConstruction), otherwise known as “Same Day Dentistry“. 

Using CAD/CAM (computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing), the CEREC process allows Dr. Rockey to construct, produce, and insert individual porcelain restorations directly at the point of treatment (chairside) in a single appointment, rather than over multiple appointments with lab work in between. Today a permanent porcelain restoration can be delivered, the same day, in a single appointment, within an hour or two. Dr. Rockey has used the CEREC technology for over ten years; the current machine that he speaks about in the video below is his fourth machine. 

Prior to the introduction of the CEREC machine, the process to deliver a permanent porcelain restoration for a patient, would include:

• Numbing the patient (local anesthesia)
• Drilling to remove the disease
• Making the impression, then send it off to a laboratory for the porcelain restoration to be created
• Making a temporary restoration for the patient
• Patient returns to the office a few weeks later after the permanent porcelain restoration was made
• Numb the patient again, and deliver the permanent porcelain restoration 

Dana notes, “With the advent of the CEREC machine, we simply numb the patient, clean out the disease, leaving the healthy part of the tooth in place; the CEREC technology allows us to be conservative in retaining as much of the heathy tooth as possible. With a camera the area of the tooth is scanned and a projected model can be created with the computer software which generates a proposed solution and then sends it wirelessly to the onsite mill which will grind a piece of porcelain to create a perfectly shaped inlay in approximately 10 minutes. At the point that the inlay is prepared, it can then be placed in the patient’s tooth while they are still numb. Then, the inlay is glued, trimmed and polished and finished in a single visit.”    

CEREC saves time, making it more efficient for the patient. Additionally the risk of harming the healthy tooth structure when removing the temporary (drilling and manipulating on it twice) is also reduced.  

Video: Watch Dr. Rockey discuss the CEREC technology and show the milling unit which grinds perfect permanent porcelain restoration (inlays).



For information about Dr. Dana Rockey, click here.