Dental Product Review: DEFEND Temporary Crown and Bridge Material

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

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Wednesday, May 8, 2013

As a general practitioner, daily temporizations of fixed prosthetic preparations are a common part of my practice. It's easy to overlook the products used for these day to day tasks, but doing that can come at a price.

Over the years I've used a number of products for creating temporary restorations with varying degrees of success and satisfaction. The earliest temporaries in my office were fabricated with Jet Acrylic, but today we use the more popular cartridge polymer systems.

When it comes to choosing a temporary material, the key criteria I consider are:

Does it work well in my hands?
Is it accurate?
Is it durable and fracture resistant?
Does it polymerize quickly?
Is it compatible with composite resins?
Is it reasonably priced?

Over the years, several materials have come and gone from my practice due to the lack of one or more of the above properties or the difficulty of dealing with customer support from the company.

Discus Dental came on the scene with their tooth whitening products and eventually a plethora of other dental products. Most of them were excellent, including their temporary material PERFECTemp II. This product initially was very reasonably priced and worked as well as any product I’ve used. However, price increases lead me to look for an acceptable alternative. Many that managed to keep the cost down failed to meet the above criteria.

I recently discovered DEFEND Temporary Crown and Bridge Material via a sale through BiteDownDeals.com. My decision to give this product a shot was based purely on cost.

What I’ve found is the product works quite well in my hands and meets all the above criteria with one exception. The DEFEND material must be purged every time it is used prior to connecting the mixing tip.

Due to the 10:1 ratio of base to catalyst, enough catalyst may or may not enter the mixing tip to achieve polymerization. My initial thought was that this was going to be a huge waste of product. However, I’m finding that a cartridge lasts just as long if not longer than the products I’ve used that feature 4:1 base to catalyst ratio.

I’ve only had DEFEND in my office for a few weeks, so the jury is still out on whether or not it will become my new go to temporary material, but based on my experience so far, I’ll be reordering DEFEND until I find a reason not to.