Surgical Guide Stents

Good morning and welcome to the Shatkin F.I.R.S.T.® Monday morning minute.

Hi, I’m Dr. Todd Shatkin, and welcome to this Monday morning Minute. Today I want to talk to you about the Shatkin F.I.R.S.T.® Surgical guide stents. We’ve been making surgical guides since 2003 for our doctors for all different purposes, for denture stabilization, for single teeth, multiple teeth, roundhouse bridges, everything in between. And the reason we’ve been doing that is to help hold your hands during surgery. When we first started Shatkin F.I.R.S.T.®

Back in 2003, my father, Samuel Shatkin Sr. DDSMD, said the only way he’s going to be involved with Shatkin F.I.R.S.T.® Is if we can hold the hands of the dentist and make sure they have the same high success rate with their cases that I’ve had over the years. And back then, I was having around 95% success rate, which I’m still having to this day. And the way we help hold your hand is you send in your X rays. If it’s a CT, great. You send in your models and we plan the case on the model and on the computer with a CT guide. Once we make the plan, we then print a 3D model out of a on a digital printer.

Now, of course, in 2003, we were doing these on stone models. There was no such thing as a CT scan or a cone beam scan, and we were doing them manually, and they were working out really well. But now we’re in the next decade, right? Two decades later, we’re doing CT guided stents. We’re making 3D models, and then we’re fabricating the surgical guide to go over that model so that it’s a very precise, very precision surgical guide stent. What we’re doing is we’re positioning the implant in a 3D axis within the bone on your CT.

So when you send in your cone CT and it doesn’t matter what manufacturer the cone CT machine is, because we use Blue Sky Bio and we merge the CT scan that you send us with either digital impression or a regular stone model impression that you send to us or an impression. So we pour it up and we scan it, and we merge the two together digitally so that we can overlap the X ray scan with your model. Then either Dr. Dave Powers or myself will plan the case, put the implant analogs in the digital platform, and then we print this 3D model.

So it’s a very precise plan. If you look here, you’ll see this is a very, very thin ridge, extremely thin ridge on this particular case. But we were able to get six mini implants planned for this particular upper denture case. Okay? And then what we do is our lab will then make a surgical guide stent over that, and it’ll come out looking something like this. When it’s all done, then what we do is we disinfect it, clean it, and package it into a nice, sterile sleeve. This will come to you all ready to go. All you have to do is take this out of the sleeve and use it in the patient’s mouth.

Now, we also have our drill guide instrument. And our drill guide instrument comes in three different sizes. We have the silver, the gold, and the blue. And the reason for three different sizes is the silver is for the 1.2 pilot drill. We use a silver guide for our 2.0 and our 2.5 MDL implants. The gold one is for our 3.0 Mylo implants. This is for a 1.5 pilot drill. And the blue drill guide is for a 2.0 pilot drill, which we use for our larger implants.

Okay? So that’s the reason for the different size pilot drills. And you will have corresponding titanium sleeves that match the size of the drill guide. So in this case, a 1.5 drill will then go into this pilot drill guide instrument to position the pilot hole right in the middle of the stent sleeve. And all of you should know this. I’m sure if you’ve come to my course, you’ve seen us use these. This is how it works.

But the whole point of my discussion today is to encourage you to use the 3D surgical guides. And the reason is not just because it’s going to help you position the implants perfectly, but we’re at a point in time where medical, legally, surgical guide stents are pretty much standard of care for dental implants. And we started this a long time ago. But we’re at that point now where I feel like if you’re not using surgical guides, it could get you into a situation if you have a problem. I think one of the things that a competent attorney is going to ask is, how did you plan the case, Doctor? And did you use a surgical guide stand and was it a 3D surgical guide stand or was it a 2D surgical guide stand?

So that begs the question, how many of you have cone CT machines in your office? I think now a large number of you do, but there’s still some of you who are still using panoramic or intraoral X rays. So I would also encourage you to consider buying yourself a cone CT. Now, Shatkin F.I.R.S.T.® Sells the Generate 3D machine. And it’s a wonderful machine. We’ve been using it now in our office for, I think, almost nine years. So it’s really a great machine. And if you’re looking and you’re on the market for a cone CT, speak to one of our salespeople about the cone CT machine that we sell from Generay. It is a very reasonably priced machine and it’s excellent. I do probably 20 scans a day, every single day in our office. And it it’s a workhorse. It works really, really well.

But regardless of that, if you don’t have one, you really should think about getting one. And then you can upload those cone beam scans right to our portal. And we can make your CT Guided stents. You can also upload your digital impressions. If you have a digital impression scanner, you don’t even have to send models or impressions in the mail.

We could send it all digitally. It’ll save a couple of days shipping. So that’s my message to you today on this Monday Morning Minute. Get going with CT guided stents at Shatkin F.I.R.S.T.®. You’re going to love it, and you’re going to have excellent results. I’ll see you next week on the Monday Morning Minute.