An intra oral scan can determine missing data such as missing margins and undercuts. The scan can be accepted or rejected in real time by the click of the mouse rather than involving a courier pickup and model pour and a day after phone call.
With my business model , the lab trains the dr to scan so that the digital process functions smoothly. This takes time and for those that don't get it ,they don't get it.
As 2th has said repeatedly , good tissue management is key to any successful impression. We find that it is far easier to enforce that through a digital scan than to attempt to teach anyone how to take an impression.
We use the scanner as a communication tool to address and solve the problems we have all encountered for most of our careers.
Give me your tired, your remakes,
Your huddled dentists yearning to impress free;
The wretched refuse of your steaming model pour,
Send these, the marginless,
Bubbled distorted-tossed to me
I lift my Trios beside the golden orafice door!
Traditional impression taking has been around for a hundred years along with all the techniques of fabrication that go along with it.
We are in a transitional period similar to those who were in the industry at the turn of the 20th century. We are finding that older clinicians
who are progressive thinkers see this technology as just another tool while the conservative types who fight change of any kind just don't get it.
The younger generation of clinicians who have had computers in their lives all along get it and get it quick. A certain university in my state has recently
purchased several IO scanners and chairside milling units. This is the technology these doctors will know and embrace right out of school. Resist as you may,
but change is coming. It won't happen over night, traditional methods will be used along side digital probably for many years to come. (Still hope for you cutthroat labs)
I'll add a quote from Max Planck:
A new scientific truth does not, generally speaking, succeed because opponents are convinced or declare themselves educated, however because they die and the new generations
from the beginning learn about it as the truth.
