Newsletter #2

Lab Day West and the Full Arch Warranty

Hey there—

Just got back from Lab Day West and it confirmed what I've been thinking for a few years: the networking part of Lab Day is my favorite and even more beneficial than the actual education. Meeting new people, seeing my friends and catching up connects us to the bigger community. Research shows that these relationships have physical health benefits:

• A meta-analysis in PLOS Medicine (2010) showed that strong social relationships increase the chance of survival by 50%. That’s a bigger effect than exercise or quitting smoking.
• Robin Dunbar (Oxford) found that human brains evolved primarily for social connection, not abstract learning.

Case in point: I met up with my buddy Joe and we chatted about gratitude and how important it is for our well being. It was such a great conversation that I decided to add a quick quote of gratitude to kick off each newsletter. What a great way to start the week with a dose of gratitude and a full arch tidbit.

Gratitude Quote of the Day:

“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.” — Aesop

The Full Arch Warranty

This is a topic/question I get asked all the time from both our own clients as well as the lab owners. I presented our warranty policy at Lab Day as part of my talk for Argen that analyzed the last 1,000 arches we've done and why things fail. If you signed up from that talk, thanks for coming!

The challenge for lab owners coming up with a warranty is that we have to reconcile two bodies of information: the warranty the clients present to patients as well as what the literature tells us about the survival rate of these prosthetics. The lab is downstream of the referring dentist and the surgeon, both of whom have their own policies.

Therefore, our warranty must involve the clinician's role in treating the patient. Kyle Stanley is a dentist that coaches other dentists on how to explain complications and create realistic warranty documents. I figured it would be a good idea to look at what dentists are doing and then adapt from there. I combined his information along with the latest literature to come up with our warranty which I'm sharing below as a Word document as well as a PDF:

​Ceramics_West_Lab_Warranty_Program.pdf​Ceramics_West_Lab_Warranty_Program.docx​

That's your five minute boost! Next week's topic: full arch advice from the last ITI Consensus.

-Charles