DENTSPLY Friadent News

The 14th DENTSPLY Friadent World Symposium attracted enthusiastic dental technicians from all over the world

04-20-2010 | Focus on your successful practice

It was a congress of superlatives. It attracted 2500 participants, including around 100 dental technicians, from more than 60 countries to Barcelona on March 19-20, 2010. More than 100 internationally known lecturers explained how the latest scientific insights could be successfully integrated into practice and laboratory. Professor Lim Kwong Cheung of Hong Kong, Dr. Henry Salama from the USA and Professor Heiner Weber from Germany were the scientific chairmen of the congress.

Professor Weber places great emphasis on implant-supported restorations, but they are "preventive measures for dental health". At the same time he also emphasized the complexity of implant-prosthetic restorations. Dr. Werner Groll, managing director of DENTSPLY Friadent, described the partnership with dental technology in the following words: "We don't offer implants but solutions from the root to the crown." Dental technicians can rely on the broad experience and innovative strength of DENTSPLY, the parent company and the largest dental supply company in the world, in the development of new processes and materials. The company represents a unique interdisciplinary synergistic pool for integrating concepts for comprehensive rehabilitation of the stomatognathic system.

Digital techniques for excellent solutions

ZTM (master dental technician) Carsten Fischer (Frankfurt) and Dr. Peter Gehrke (Ludwigshafen) described the advantages of abutments customized for the individual patient and manufactured by CAD/CAM technology: offering previously unavailable accuracy in contouring the three-dimensional emergence profile specific to the patient while at the same time retaining optimum retention surfaces. The practitioner and the dental technician must work together as a team to succeed with this technology to deliver a restoration that can be perfectly seated when first fitted in place. ZTM Hans-Jürgen Joit (Düsseldorf) described how easy it is to use the factory-manufactured bars and bridges of cobalt-chromium or titanium compared to cast framework structures. The precision-milled superstructures for ANKYLOS and XiVE fit perfectly at the first try. He used the example of a porcelain restoration on XiVE to demonstrate how to achieve high-end esthetic solutions on fixed restorations with the right components, in this case Cercon Ceram.

Dr. Paul Weigl (University of Frankfurt) described the application of 8-mm short implants. As far as the prosthetics are concerned there is certainly no difference from longer implants, but the centric and occlusion must be set extremely accurately because the longer crowns exert increased forces on the restoration.

Emphasis on teamwork

Presenters repeatedly emphasized the importance of consistent backward planning by working as a team with the dental technician to be able to achieve a restoration with optimum biomechanical and gnathological features. The results speak for themselves: when this is implemented, the practice has no shortage of enthusiastic patients. Delegates were also enthusiastic on the evening of the first day of the congress. The great get-together was set for the Magic Fountain at the foot of the Montjuic. They celebrated on the grounds of the 1929 World's Fair with culinary specialties and hot rhythms into the early hours of next morning – and on the dance floor they demonstrated how well the team approach between dentists and dental technologists works in practice.

Overwhelming reception: farewell until 2012

The positive response of attendees to the wide range of topics, the general level of lecturers and also to the organization of the congress was simply overwhelming. The DENTSPLY Friadent World Symposium has now become one of the most important implantology congresses in the world bit it still retains a family atmosphere in spite of its size and professionalism. Many attendees have already indicated that they will be coming to the next World Symposium in 2012.The 15th DENTSPLY Friadent World Symposium will be in Hamburg on March 16-17, 2012.