When Dennis White graduated began his career in 1980, he took over a practice from a retiring dentist in Cranbury, and he needed to make a good impression on his patients.##M:[more]##
“I knew half of these people coming in — they were old farmers,” says White, who grew up in a farming family from Plainsboro. “I couldn’t be embarrassed by something not fitting,” he said referring to crowns, porcelain veneers, night guards, and other dental work that require impressions to accurately fit to a patient’s teeth.
His dissatisfaction with a 58-year-old system for creating those impressions and his persistence in finding the solution has taken him on more than 20 years of research to find an accurate system. Four dental patents later, White is convinced he has finally invented the perfect method, which he has dubbed Impresfit, for taking impressions that fit a patient’s mouth and teeth to a tee — eliminating the time and hassle dentists have to spend adjusting crowns and other dental pieces when the impressions used to create them are distorted and have caused them to fit too tightly.
Now, it is just a matter of convincing other dental professionals to get on board and follow suit, abandoning the methods they have been using for nearly 60 years. White, who lives with his family on Nostrand Road in Plainsboro, will present a lecture on his new method on Wednesday, May 21, at 8:30 a.m. at the Cranbury Inn. His Powerpoint presentation includes videos of his dental assistants and his own son taking night guards that had been made using his method right out of the sealed bag from the lab, rinsing them, and popping them into their mouths right away, fitting perfectly.
White explains that the traditional method dentists use is to first take an impression of a patient’s mouth using the impression gel — made from extracts from seaweed — which feels like chewing gum. The gel then sits. In the meantime, wet dental stone is poured into the impression so that it sets, and a model of the teeth is created. “That model is distorted,” White says. “It distorts because the stone shrinks. It shrinks to the middle, so it consequently is smaller.”
Discovering this, White then set out on doing the method a little differently. “I found that when you condition the surface of the impression with a stone-setting catalyst, that wet stone you put in the impression sets first against the impression,” he explains. “So, you have to mold your impression. Instead of allowing it to set on its own, and shrinking, you pour it in so that the stone sets first, touching the surface of the impression. Then all of the distortion, all of the shrinkage occurs on the top coming down, so you control where the expansion is.”
White says this method, which is patent pending, is a dental breakthrough. But, he adds, dentists are set in their ways. “I have to prove to them that there are inaccuracies.”
He points to numerous articles in dental journals in which other professionals in the field cite hardship when it comes to getting accurate impressions. One author says the trick to having well-fitting crowns is that when an impression is removed from the tray, it has to be done using a certain kind of “rapid pull.” Another says the tray has to be a special shape, and still, another suggests that metal trays give the best impressions. “Evidently, there is a problem or else they wouldn’t be writing these articles, and every person’s giving a different answer,” White says.
White says attending any dental lecture or watching any professional DVD always advises to “pay attention to detail and instruction,” he says. “That doesn’t do anything; that maintains status quo. I never completely accepted it. I had to prove it for myself that this is as good as it gets.”
Perhaps it is the do-it-yourself trait he inherited from his time growing up on a farm that has kept White persistent in inventing the new method. His grandfather was a farmer in Plainsboro who lived on John White Road within the township. His father was born and raised in Plainsboro, and bought a potato farm in East Windsor around 1945 in an area near Route 571 and Old Trenton Road, known to locals as Locusts Corner.
White lived there with his father, whom he helped with the farming duties, and his mother, a housewife who took care of the family’s five children. He attended St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia, and immediately went for four more years at the University of Pennsylvania upon completing his undergraduate work. He then moved to Plainsboro about a mile from where his grandfather was raised, and has lived on Nostrand Road with his wife, Barbara, a registered nurse in the emergency room at the University Medical Center at Princeton, and his son, Dennis, a third grader at St. Paul’s in Princeton.
“I was really good with my hands, and I was really good at science,” White says of choosing his career. His wife also jokes about how detail-oriented he is. When choosing a color for a crown, he uses a color tab to ensure everything matches precisely. He says his wife has been supportive of him throughout all of his research. “Could you imagine if you were married to the Wright Brothers, listening to airplane wing configurations every night?” he laughs, comparing the technicalities of the two professions.
Actually, the couple, who just celebrated their 13th wedding anniversary, also share similar agricultural roots. Barbara was raised on a dairy farm in Hillsborough, where a house on the farm site has been in her family for 300 years. The couple met when one of White’s dental patients, who also has ties to farming and worked with Barbara at the hospital, introduced them.
When he began his research, he began trying different additives, until one day, he created the perfect one. At first, he was frustrated because he couldn’t produce the same results the next day, but later realized he had “inadvertently added the catalyst to the surface of the impression material,” he explained. “Once I realized that, it was the discovery. Ever since then, every single cast has been dimensionally accurate.”
After White discovered the Impresfit method that worked, including his method for pouring the stones, he and his family took a trip to Ann Arbor, where he met with an independent evaluation company known as the Dental Advisor. He took two impressions of his own teeth, this time using the traditional method the first time, and using his the second. “It was a hands-on demonstration,” he said. “I didn’t want any misconception or misinterpretation.”
He then took his calipers — a device that measures the width of a tooth — and measured one of the teeth in the first impression. The measurement came out to be exactly 10 millimeters. Then, using the casting created from his new method, he measured it, showing that his tooth was actually 10.5 centimeters wide, which he says can make a big difference when it comes to having a crown or mouth guard fit perfectly the first time. He says sometimes patients see dentists take perfect impressions, and then, when the crown comes back, they wonder why the dentist is adjusting it. This can strain the relationship between a dentist and a patient, he said. “You normally spend an hour adjusting these, and then you hope the patient is comfortable with it,” he said. “It’s a forced compromise for practicality reasons.”
In addition to dental professionals, White is also inviting ocularists — eye care professionals who specialize in fitting prosthetic eyes to patients — to the May 21 lecture, since they use the same methods for making impressions for those who have lost an eye. “They borrow from our profession, and they inherit all the imperfection along with it,” he says. “All the mistakes that are inherent to our process is duplicated in their process.” The same goes for half of all hearing aids that are made, White says.
“All discoveries are simple once they’re explained, but the biggest discoveries bring the biggest amount of skepticism,” he says. And he’s determined to change that.
Dennis J. White DMD, 41 North Main Street, Cranbury 08512. 609-395-0764. whiteteeth@comcast.net.
