Howard Speaks By: Howard Farran, DDS, MBA, MAGD
Publisher, DentalTown Magazine

Every single dentist in America has to visit the IDS meeting at least once in their lifetime. Germany is a not to miss country and they love Americans! Dentists from the United States sometimes forget the world has over a million dentists! With 6000 million earthlings, the world ratio is about one dentist for every 6000 people. Amazing when one realizes the U.S. has a dentist for every 1850 people (Fig. 1).

IDS stands for International Dental Show. You can find a dentist from every corner of the earth at the IDS meeting. It is held every other year, always in Cologne, Germany. The meeting is so huge there is no way you can see it all in the time allowed. It is so interesting to see and hear such a wide variety of different treatment modalities for the same set of dental disease conditions. So many dentists, so many perspectives! There are no lectures at the IDS meeting. The European dentists have a much more meaningful relationship with dental manufacturers than their U.S. peers. I have been saying for ten years that if you took away about 200 dental companies, dentists would be sitting outside on rugs shucking teeth with sticks and rocks. The only reason dentists look so good is due to the mountain of technology dental manufacturers have created. Could you imagine practicing dentistry without them?

Dr. Farran’s visit to Germany included a visit to KaVo. Pictured left to right are: John Franz, KaVo America CEO/President; Judith and Dr. Howard Farran; Angelika Goeppel, KaVo America Marketing Manager; and Arthur Petrich, KaVo Dental GmbH Export Sales Manager

At a typical U.S. dental meeting, manufacturers are dying to show you their latest and greatest inventions on which they have worked so hard and invested countless dollars! American dentists prefer not to listen to manufacturers because they see them as evil “for profit” entrepreneurs. The problem is dentists themselves are “for profit” businessmen. How ironic! The typical American dentist prefers listening to a handful of “experts” who claim to understand basically everything there is to know in dentistry! The Europeans see these middlemen as distractions from a deeper relationship.

In Europe, dentists go straight to the manufacturer to learn about new products. The European dentists/manufacturer relationship is much more mutually beneficial, interactive, trusting, functional & fun! It was common to have a full bar and food at every major booth! Just like the last call at the bar, at 6 p.m. everyday you were sad it was over!

I was privileged to lecture at the KaVo booth for three days and then Judith and I played for the rest of the week! The highlight of the meeting was visiting the KaVo factory in Biberach, Germany to see the new HealOzone technology, the new Key 3 laser, and to get a sense of what they mean when they say “Made in Germany”. You could eat off the floor at KaVo. It was truly amazing to see the level of quality that went into everything KaVo makes.

The HealOzone technology by KaVo integrates the use of ozone, O3, to sterilize cavities and endodontically prepared teeth. This technology is already a huge success in Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, and many other parts of Europe. When a patient has an occlusal cavity, 20 seconds of ozone will kill off all the bacteria. Then various take home products, pastes, and mouthwashes will remineralize the tooth. With a Diagnodent you could actually measure the lesion each month and record the results as the tooth remineralizes. This should get through the FDA in about a year or two.

For all you endo lovers once you finish cleaning and shaping the root canal, you apply 20 seconds of ozone, it should be bacteria free! The HealOzone could revolutionize concepts such as letting bleach, NaOCl, soak in a non-vital tooth for 30 minutes and a vital tooth for 45 minutes to an hour. This step might be replaced in 20 seconds of HealOzone! Obviously this will take a lot of research over the next a couple of years but it sure sounds exciting!

Every periodontist, family practicing general dentist and hygienist should be jumping up and down waiting for the new Key 3 laser! This was a truly mind-boggling piece of equipment. You know that no matter how much you scale and root plane, when you reflect back the tissue during periosurgery you always find calculus you missed. If all the calculus had been removed during scaling and root planing the patient probably wouldn’t have even needed periosurgery. So KaVo took their Diagnodent laser technology and combined it with a diode laser to make a perio laser that detects and blasts away subgingival calculus, automatically! The Key 3 perio laser is truly amazing. Calculus is such a different color than cementum, the laser will keep firing until all the calculus is gone and automatically stop when it reaches cementum. I’m sure this will be a little harder to get through the FDA but look for this in about a year or two!

We also visited the Sirona factory in Bensheim, Germany to see the new Cerec 3-D software and their new line of handpieces. The Cerec 3-D is a huge improvement over the Cerec 3, which was a huge improvement over the Cerec 2, which blew doors on the original Cerec. If you do very many porcelain inlays, porcelain onlays, and full porcelain crowns, the Cerec 3-D technology has definitely reached a new all time price performance peak! If you haven’t demoed this new software you really need to! Think Star Wars & dentistry! You really have to see it to believe it! The Cerec debate is so hot and active on the message boards at www.dentaltown.com you just have to log on and read it!

The new intraoral camera I got to demo at the SciCan booth was amazing! It took a first class picture and has enough software to do anything in the world with your image. Then they showed me the fiberoptic attachments that allow you to see all the way down an endo canal. Unbelievable!! This simply left me drooling! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! I bet every endodontist and every endo loving general dentist in the world will be checking this out! In fact it should be in the stores by summer!

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