Category Archives: General Info

I apologize to those of you who have been looking for this site for the last couple of weeks.  Due to some technical issues that will bore the average reader the site was off line.  It is back though and you can look forward to the following future articles:

The Greatest Investment I Ever Made in Dental School

Applying to Post Doctoral Programs

How to Start an IV for Sedation (trying to get video for this as well)

Thanks for reading!

The features of GMAIL are far superior to that of hotmail and so I have switched emails.  I now use the following email address:

templedmdstudent [ @ ]  gmail  [ . ]   com

As you can see it is the same besides the gmail part.  Just removes the brackets and spaces [ ]

This is the second part of Porcelain Fused to Metal Crown.

The metal part of a porcelain fused to metal [PFM] crown is called the coping.  As dental students we are required to wax up the full contour of the tooth on a stone replica of the patients tooth.  After the full contour has been made the wax is cut back.  The portion of the wax that is removed will be filled in later with porcelain.  After the wax has been cut back and smoothed it is connected to a wax sprue and invested into stone.  The stone hardens around the wax and then the wax is melted out and then cast with metal.  The final result is below:

These pictures show the crowns attached to the sprue and the button. They are cut off as seen in subsequent photos.

I took the first few photos without the flash for better contrast of the cut back. Here is the final coping product on the stone model. The metal has been polished. To polish I followed these steps:

1) Remove the crowns from the sprue and use a diamond bur to remove the excess metal.
2) Polish everything lightly with heatless green stone burs. Either avoid the margins or be careful around them. Use them on the cut back area as well.
3) Use brownies on slow speed and just polish the normal contour of the tooth.
4) Inspect the normal contour for any deep scratches. If you find a scratch, repolish it with a green stone and then repolish with a brownie until it shines bright.
5) Polish with a greenie and then an ultra greenie until it has a mirror finish.

Here are the results:

The patient came in and tried on these copings and the fit was perfect. They have been submitted to our in house porcelain lab and should be done in a few weeks. More to come as this case progresses.

You can browse through my old posts and find that I try to find other excellent dental websites that are fun to read (a break from crunching through textbooks and peer reviewed journal articles).  Well this time a website owner found me.  I enjoyed reading through his blog because he is a new dentist, just like many of us will shortly become and it is exciting to read about his stories.

He writes about his procedures – his technique (good or bad), materials used, etc., case studies, and other relevant dental news and articles that new dentists are bound to come across.

You can find his website at http://www.thenewdentist.blogspot.com

Be sure to bookmark his page or subscribe in a reader program such as google reader.  While you’re at it, subscribe to mine as well!  Keep up the interesting blog Dr. Austin!

I have noticed a downward trend in the amount of participation amongst some of our school clubs.  This is not the case with some clubs (Like the Pediatric Dentistry Club which seems to have 200 members) but some clubs have become nonexistent or participation has decreased.  Maybe it is a Temple Dental thing or maybe it is a trend seen at other schools as well.  I think there are several reasons to this:

1) Dental School has become more competitive to get into and thus there are more competitive people in dental school leading to people who do nothing but study.  There is nothing wrong with studying.  My study buddies and I used to be studying whores (Part I Boards naturally destroyed any desire to ever study again), but now we have mellowed out and seem to get the same grades as before.

2) Unaware.  Some people just don’t know about opportunities to get involved.  I missed out on a few opportunities to get involved because I checked my email too late or the event was not publicized correctly.  In this case you may have to ask about certain clubs or opportunities.  If your interest is really that great you can even start your own club.  A club was recently started at our school called the Cosmetic Dentistry Club.

3) Apathy. Some people could care less about the ortho club or the endo club.  I say poo on you.  You are missing out on a great opportunity to learn with your peers about more things related to dentistry.  If you don’t think the club has great speakers then search around your community to bring in a dentist or specialist that can give some meaningful clinical advice in a lunch and learn setting.

Getting involved lets you meet new people, work with others, plan and create activities that others will enjoy and is another way to enrich dental school.  A club usually has an opening social, speakers from the community or various dental programs nearby (like a GPR or a specialty program), food at each meeting (paid for by subsidized school club funds or from membership dues), and they are usually fun.

I have gotten involved in ASDA, Temple Haiti Club (outreach group that travels to Haiti), Oral Surgery Club, Practice management club, XIP fraternity, and am a member of a few others.  It has been fun and I recommend it to anyone to break up the boredome of studying and lab work.