Many prosthetics - no matter if Crown or Bridge , fixed or removeable - are functioning unsatisfactory. With great effort the dentist has to work out the functions in hard materials (ceramics/metals) using the patient as an articulator . You cannot blame "wrong articulators" for this misery. The reason is missing, wrong or poor information: Patient and articulator are not identical. Thats why it does not work in the mouth. The Artex(R) Analogue System offers the simple solution for standard use : Equality of man and articulator. Closer than a Split Hair When it comes to receptor sensitivity, our articulators leave nothing to chance: < 20 µm (2/100 mm) is the prescribed value tolerance inside of which they must keep. That is no more than a quarter of the width of a human hair. Teeth are also organs of touch, though we usually think of them as tools for chopping up our food into conveniently small pieces. Yet via our central nerval system they also transmit orders to the muscular system that steers mandibular movement. Thus they both do their job and protect themselves at the same time. Not only can they register the proverbial hair in the soup, but they can feel any foreign body larger than 2/100 mm. This also means they have no trouble registering built-in malocclusion or incorrectly placed cusps and contact points. That's why articulators with any claim to receptor sensitivity must keep within the narrow tolerances of which our sense of touch is capable. Articulators should ideally be receptor-tailored movement simulators, an exact analog copy of the patient. This is not a matter of size, design, or even price; it essentially turns on whether the articulator can reproduce the centric position to within a tolerance of < 20 µm. And this requires closest cooperation between the practice and the laboratory. |