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Show Notes

665: Treatment Planning & Digital Are Not the Same Thing! – Dr. Jeff Rouse

If you’re new in the digital space, there’s one thing you should know: digital smile design and treatment planning are not the same thing! To explain how they’re different and why the confusion is one of his biggest pet peeves, Kirk Behrendt brings back Dr. Jeff Rouse from Spear Education with advice for using digital and analog in your treatment planning process. Analog isn’t outdated just yet! To learn why the best dentists still use analog, listen to Episode 665 of The Best Practices Show!

Episode Resources:

• Join Dr. Rouse on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jeff.rouse.58
• Follow Dr. Rouse on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeffreyrouse
• Subscribe to The Best Practices Show podcast: https://the-best-practices-show.captivate.fm/listen
• Join ACT’s To The Top Study Club: https://www.actdental.com/ttt
• See ACT’s Live Events Schedule: https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/act-dental-live-workshops-306239
• Get The Best Practices Magazine for free! https://www.actdental.com/magazine
• Write a review on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-best-practices-show/id1223838218

Links Mentioned in This Episode:

Register for Facially Generated Treatment Planning at Spear Education (December 2-4, 2023): https://campus.speareducation.com/workshops/facially-generated-treatment-planning/details/syllabus

Main Takeaways:

Understand the difference between treatment planning and digital design.

Digital still has some limitations for certain kinds of cases.

Smile design software is not a treatment planning tool.

Don’t go fully digital until you master analog.

Using software can lead you to overtreat.

Quotes:

“I love the idea behind [digital] of creating a motivational mock-up. So, when DSD or Dr. Christian [Coachman] talks about doing that, I think that’s perfect. I absolutely agree with the whole concept of being able to motivate a patient to continue on and create the desire to do dentistry. Got it. The problem comes when you believe that is treatment planning — because it’s not. It’s a motivational mock-up to get people interested in doing something, but it tells you nothing about how to actually do the dentistry.” (4:46—5:34)

“Digital designing doesn’t show you how to treatment plan the case. It simply is a way of giving an illusion to a patient to create a desire to act, but it doesn’t treatment plan the case. In fact, I would argue, in some cases, it actually does quite a bit of harm because unless you’re skilled at treatment planning, you don’t know what can and can’t be accomplished. You just simply pick out the perfect place for a smile, and it doesn’t matter if the teeth are going to actually work with that final smile at all, and it ends up creating the need for more dentistry, some dentistry that doesn’t really need to be done. There are tons of problems…