Digital Dentistry and Your Next Checkup!
The last time I blogged I asked you to remember that all parts of us are connected to each other. Now, I want to ask you to remember something else… the good old days. If you’re really young, you won’t be able to remember what I’m talking about, but you still will understand. Some of us haven’t made the switch yet, but most of us have. It requires buying new equipment, but it has eliminated many other expenses. Purists and professionals swear by the old technology, but hardly anyone else does. One huge corporation has fallen on hard times in the space of ten years due to this new development. Can you guess who this is? It’s Kodak. The topic is photography.
In the good old days, Kodak sold millions of rolls of film for our cameras. They sold cameras, too, and the paper and chemicals needed to develop and print the pictures we took. You would buy the film, load the camera, take your pictures, unload the camera, take the film to the drugstore, wait a week, then pick up your pictures. You would never know how they would turn out until you saw them. Each print cost money to produce, so sometimes you might be very careful about how many pictures you took, and possibly be disappointed when you saw how they turned out. Oops, it’s too dark or Oops, the picture is blurry or Oops, my subject’s eyes are closed. Then, you would proudly show the good ones to your family or friends in all their glorious index card size. Maybe one really good one would be worth “blowing up”, so you would take the negative back to the drugstore, etc, etc, etc, and if you wanted to send copies to Grandma, same thing. These were the good old days?
Taking a picture at the dental office, an X-ray, happens just about the same way. We have used special film that is sensitive to the X-rays that is developed using chemicals in a film processor. The resulting pictures are good, but quite small, cannot be seen until developed, cannot be sent to another doctor or insurance company without making copies, and cost money for each picture taken. Until recently, that is. The same digital revolution in photography has happened to dental X-rays or radiography. The world is going digital, and Southern Dental is going digital, too.
Three of our offices, Spring Branch, Deerbrook, and our new Pasadena location are using digital X-rays. The remaining offices will be equipped with digital soon, phasing in the new technology over the next two years. The advantages of digital over conventional are many. The amount of radiation used is reduced by as much as 90%, the picture is available immediately, and it can be viewed on a computer monitor much larger than any regular film to allow a more detailed image for the doctor to read. Digital X-rays can be copied and e-mailed to other doctors and insurance companies in seconds.
So, we welcome you to our offices for a check-up. We will take your picture, well at least we’ll take pictures of your teeth. These will be digital pictures at Spring Branch, Deerbrook, and Pasadena, with our other offices to follow in the future. These are exciting times for dentistry. Even more is coming. Stay tuned.
