How Spear's 'Terminal Dentition' Seminar is a Game-Changer for Your Patients and Practice

Are you a restorative dentist eager to treat edentulous patients and increase your knowledge of prosthetic design?

Is your interdisciplinary team lacking the necessary skills to recognize and fully treat a terminal dentition or fully edentulous patient?

Are you already treating such patients, but looking to improve your techniques and treatment planning skills?

Drs. Ricardo Mitrani and Darin Dichter strategically designed Spear’s “Treating the Terminal Dentition and Fully Edentulous Patient” to equip doctors with every tool they need to recognize, accept and treat cases involving fully edentulous patients and the terminal dentition.

“The terminal dentition is a dentist-made word,” Mitrani said. “There comes a point in time in which the benefit of removing teeth outweighs the risks of keeping them – that’s what this seminar explains. The goal of this curriculum is to explain parameters with which to evaluate the terminal dentition as well as clear up confusion that exists on how to best treat the condition.”

Mitrani urged doctors to strongly consider attending the seminar with their interdisciplinary teams.

“This seminar puts the perspective of the surgeon, the technician and the restorative dentist on the same level,” he said. “It unifies the criteria for treatment planning and dissipates the lines that exist between interdisciplinary team members in order to make conversations between them more clear-cut.”

The curriculum is not intended to simply offer one single solution to the dynamic and unique condition that is the terminal dentition. Patients can present in any number of ways, and Drs. Mitrani and Dichter highlight multiple options for managing this patient population. Using tools like decision trees, doctors will learn various aspects of therapy and treatment and gain a deeper understanding of what is best for each type of patient.

Attendees can expect to walk away with a deeper understanding of:

• how to determine tooth and tissue position 
• how to properly support or maintain teeth
• which prosthetic options to consider in order to best meet the patient's expectations and financial capacity 
• how to utilize a combination of both digital and analog techniques 
• proper interdisciplinary treatment planning, communication and sequencing

Dr. Mitrani explained that the curriculum offers many tips on managing such cases in a way that ensures every procedure seamlessly connects to the next, resulting in a successful, highly satisfactory prosthesis - yet another reason this seminar is so critical for the interdisciplinary team.

Beyond offering detailed steps for executing this type of treatment, this seminar is designed to highlight the importance and outcome of taking on these types of patients. Dr. Mitrani is passionate about showing dentists how to properly recognize these cases from the get-go and accept more of them.

But what if you’re not regularly seeing patients who present this way to begin with?

“It’s not that you’re not seeing them,” Mitrani said. “It’s that you’re not recognizing them. And even if you don’t anticipate doing much of this treatment, it’s still so important to know how to refer these cases out.”

Improving your knowledge of how to properly recognize and treat the terminal dentition is critical to not only your patients, but your practice as a whole.

“These patients are the best practice-builders,” Mitrani said. “They are going to constantly refer their friends to you. Because of the significant impact this type of treatment has on not just their health, but their overall self-esteem, they truly embrace the concept of rewarding dental treatment unlike anyone else.”