The Top 5 Reasons for Dentists to Visit Lab Day

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Dentalcompare
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 Dentalcompare Blog: The Top 5 Reasons for Dentists to Visit Lab Day

The dental industry will be pouring into Chicago next week for the Chicago Dental Society’s annual Midwinter Meeting at McCormick Place and a number of other dental events taking place throughout downtown.

There is never a shortage of things to do and see with CDS packed with educational, networking and social opportunities for the entire team. And with more than 600 companies setting up booths, just walking the Exhibit Hall could eat up an entire weekend. So much will be happening at McCormick Place that a clinician could be forgiven for not leaving the building for anything beyond food and sleep.

But restorative dentistry doesn’t happen solely in the operatory, and it can be helpful to know a bit about what’s happening with dental labs, so it’s extremely convenient that just 3 miles north of McCormick Place the largest dental lab show in North America takes place concurrently with the CDS Midwinter Meeting.

Here are 5 great reasons every dentist should make the trip up the lakefront to visit LMT Lab Day.

  1. Networking – Lab Day is the place where lab technicians, owners, manufacturers and everyone else working in the industry gets together. It can be a great place to finally meet the person who has been crafting your crowns for years or to hear what top technicians think is new and exciting. It’s certainly a great place to make new connections between your practice and dental laboratories.
    If you are heading to the show to do some networking, it’s a good idea to plan ahead and arrange a time and place to meet rather than hoping to just bump into someone. Lab Day is a busy place packed with people checking out exhibits and educational sessions on multiple floors.
  2. CAD/CAM – Sure there will be some digital dental technology on display at McCormick Place with a half dozen or so digital impression systems and the pair of full chairside CAD/CAM systems, but the technology is far more established in the dental lab industry, and there will be far more to see at Lab Day such as demos of the new Zfx system from Zimmer and the latest features added to Straumann’s CARES 8.0.
    The show is a great place to get a look at all the digital possibilities whether you’re considering adding chairside scanning and want to learn what happens after you take a digital impression, or are an established digital practice and want to look into expanding your chairside capabilities by adding extra restoration possibilities via dental lab CAD software and possibly an open architecture tabletop mill for a custom chairside set up.
  3. 3D Printing – The breakout technology of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, 3D printing has actually been a growing part of the dental lab industry for a number of years. Whether it’s printed models, printed surgical guides or printed wax patterns for casting and pressing, plenty of labs are putting additive manufacturing to work for them. Lab Day is a great place to see this technology up close. It might not be ready for chairside applications just yet, but working with a lab using 3D printing could mean faster turnaround for your restorative cases. Besides, seeing those machines build something out of nothing for the first time is quite mesmerizing.
  4. Materials – Want to learn about every available option and talk to people who know everything about your restorative materials, Lab Day is it. The exhibit hall is one of the only places you can see master technicians stacking porcelain at one table and the latest milling technology shaping a new monolithic option down the row. It’s a great place to learn about new material choices which could open new restorative possibilities for your practice, and while many of these materials will be on display at McCormick Place, Lab Day is where to find the people who quite literally know them inside and out.
  5. Innovative Workflows that Start in the Lab – With the dental lab market adopting digital technologies at a faster rate than the clinical side of the dental industry, it makes sense that dental labs have become a wellspring of new workflows and fabrication options to provide dentists with faster turnaround and better fitting restorations. Among other innovations that will be previewed is B&D Dental’s DigitalPrep Guide system, a new protocol where the prep is designed digitally and the crown is produced before a bur ever touches the tooth. 
  6. Bonus Reason #6 – There is no cost to visit Lab Day and wander the exhibit hall. Why not take a few hours Friday or Saturday to check it out.

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