Digital dentistry: Is this the future of dentistry?
The connotations of being past the year 2020 bring about thoughts of futuristic concepts as suggested by movies, the Internet, and a vast array of media. Movies and books, set in a time period only a few decades forward, have portrayed a life filled with advanced medicine, travel, engineering, manufacturing, and even rapid and simple food production. Yet, when we reach that future date, we observe that technology doesn’t change as fast as our minds imagine. Does dentistry today — often termed “digital dentistry” — represent the high-tech, easy-to-implement solutions that were imagined and written about 30 years ago or even last year? Clinicians with decades of experience or the student of dental history can look back at the advances in dentistry and state clearly that the dental profession has experienced an exciting amount of technological growth. Yet in comparison to medicine, biomedical engineering, automotive and aeronautics, rapid manufacturing, electron...