When to Use Healing Caps

Good morning, and I’m Dr. Todd Shatkin and welcome to this Monday morning minute. Today I want to talk to you about when to use healing caps and what they’re for. And many of you use these all the time and you know what we use them for, but I just want to refresh those of you who may have some questions about when and when not to use a healing cap and when maybe they should use something other than a healing cap. So in my office is I like to use healing caps under my single and multiple tooth restorations while the temporary is in place.

And so what I do is I snap these little white healing caps onto the implant and then I put my temporary resin crown over the top. Usually I fabricate these temporaries right in the office, but we can also fabricate those for you in the laboratory so you have some temporaries to place on the implants immediately. And then what we do is we just cement the temporaries right onto this healing cap. I’ll show you an actual healing cap outside of the mouth and this just snaps right over the O-ball and it will stay very securely on the O-ball with the temporary until you’re ready to pop that off and then make your put your permanent crown in. So the nice thing about this is you don’t have to cement the crowns to the implants.

You cement the crowns to the healing cap or just fabricate the temporary resin right over the healing cap so that you can then snap that crown off and cement the permanent crown a couple of weeks later. You don’t have to cut it off or anything, it just pops right off. Now, if you’re doing a temporary roundhouse, I like to use O-ring housings under the temporary roundhouse. And Shatkin F.I.R.S.T.® Will make a beautiful temporary roundhouse bridge and trough it all out for you. You may have to trough it out a little bit more depending on where you end up placing your implants to make room for all of those housings.

But you put the housings on the implants and pick the housings up with a temporary resin material, something like Lux Attempt or Visalis. You can also do the same thing with the healing caps. You can pick those healing caps in a Luxtemp product off the implants and then snap the bridge back on after you clean it and trim it and polish it. So for the roundhouses, I like to use the O-ring housings. For smaller segments, I typically use these plastic healing caps as temporary anchoring devices on top of the mini implants.

So I hope that’s been helpful to you. If you have any questions, of course, anytime. Just call our office and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have. And I look forward to talking to you next Monday on the Monday Morning Minute.