Eliminate Bonding Procedure With Shofu’s FIT SA™ Self-Adhesive Flowable Composite
Jennifer Bell, DDS, FAGD, FICD, owns two practices in the Raleigh, N.C., area, both of which are focused on all-encompassing family dental care, offering a wide range of restorative and cosmetic dentistry services to patients of all ages. This means she may go from treating a child to an elderly patient in the same hour, with her work varying from simple restorations to laser dentistry to complex prosthodontic cases.
"We treat patients from 1 to 99 years old," Bell says. "Our practices are community-centered businesses, focused on serving patients with high-quality, approachable dental care."
As a dentist treating pediatric, general, and geriatric populations, Bell says the dental materials she utilizes need to be easy to apply, long lasting, and require minimal time and equipment.
One such product that Bell has recently incorporated into her practice is Shofu's new FIT SA™, a self-adhesive flowable composite that eliminates the technique-sensitive bonding procedure.
"Self-adhesive dental materials have a long track record and have been heavily researched and documented. Therefore, I didn't have any doubt that FIT SA would meet or exceed expectations," she says. "FIT SA is a flowable composite that removes the need for a bonding agent by providing both chemical and mechanical bonds to the tooth structure."
For the busy clinician who operates multiple practices, serves on several advisory boards, and is an active member of multiple national dental associations, not to mention devoting time to her husband and their three children, Bell says choosing the right product for both her and her patients is crucial. "The merits of FIT SA center around ease of use, quick application, and biomimetic reactivity, all leading to predictable outcomes." She also lauds the esthetics and polishability of the nanohybrid composite.
Like other Shofu restorative materials, FIT SA features the company's proprietary Giomer Technology, which is clinically proven to offer healthful, bioactive properties for the life of the restoration. "Dentistry continues to move toward materials that repair the tooth by continuing to provide benefits to the patient long after the restoration placement," Bell explains. "Giomers provide ongoing benefits of acid neutralization, continuous fluoride release and re-charge, and antibacterial qualities. This means that our restorations not only provide new strength and protection to teeth but improve their resistance to further degradation in the future."
Bell acknowledges that once a clinician places a restoration in a patient, there is no way to know the ongoing compliance of that patient. Depending on the patient's oral hygiene habits, economic status, medical condition, or countless other factors, visits to the dental office are often not a top priority. "Thus, we need to be using materials that can withstand challenges and provide benefit for the patient when getting to our office is not feasible."
FIT SA is competitively priced and easy to integrate into the workflow, Bell adds. "Much of the economic benefit is from the simplicity of the process that FIT SA provides. Dental manufacturers like Shofu seem to understand the unique challenges that dentists face, especially those trying to provide care for economically challenged patients, and are innovating products that are very supportive to our workflow. Even better is the fact that we do not have to compromise the quality of our outcomes to save on our dental supply overhead."
Shofu Dental Corporation
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