It always strikes me as funny when people say CEREC is the future of dentistry. Actually, CEREC is the present, the here and now. If you really believe it's the future then you will sit back and watch the technology pass you by. The 4.0 software is spectacular and offers the practitioner so much. Designing multiple restorations at once is a pleasure and greatly speeds up the entire process.

Now more than ever it is necessary to be skilled at various techniques to help avoid a backlog at the slowest phase of the process: Milling. Now, don't get me wrong, milling is fast and efficient. It's just that we are tempted, now more than ever, to throw a great deal at the mill, as usually our designs are all completed at the same time. For that reason, techniques like SArmen help to make the entire process blazingly fast.

The real reason I am writing this is to talk about an issue I had last week, and my low-tech approach to overcome it. I had a patient with a cosmetic emergency. I was able to work her into the day between regularly scheduled patients. She was sound asleep in her bed, when a heavy picture fell from the wall and fractured several of her front teeth. That's a heck of a way to wake up.

We diagnosed, prepped and imaged, and went on to another patient. I used Biogeneric individual, a design technique I generally avoid in the anterior; it worked like a charm on this case. Between patients, I designed her restorations. They were all ready for the mill at the same time. I milled the first and went to do other things. My staff finished the milling one-by-one. At try-in, I realized that we had two right centrals and no left central. No big deal, only a six-minute error. It got me thinking...

My answer to this confusion that can occur when milling multiple units was very simple. It came in the form of a Post-it note. As each unit is milled, the tooth number is written down. When it's completed, we place an X over it and write down the next number. So simple, so silly. Maybe someday we will be able to have some sort of a milling queue. Just set it up and mill one by one. For now, we have a pencil and paper. It feels good and comforting sometimes to take a step back to simpler times.