Editorial
stamped-metal crowns, as well as ceramic crowns or amalgam fillings or gold inlays or onlays.
There followed successive contributions and improvements to dental practice made by the craftsmen of the past, such
as Beverly B. McCollum, Harvey Stallard, Charles E. Stuart, Peter K. Thomas, to name but a few or by contemporary
masters, such as Rudolf Slavicek, Julian B. Woelfel, Jean-François Roulet and numerous of our distinguished editors.
We are now in the age of precise CAM technology, when dentists are faced with a variety of challenges posed by the
development of digital technology.
While in the 1960s, CAD / CAM was typical of aeronautics and automobile industries, for the last 30 years it has become
available to dentistry, shifting from the dental technician’s laboratory to the dentist’s dental office.
The first to use CAD / CAM concepts in dental applications was a French dentist, Dr. François Duret, who defended his
graduation paper on “l’empreinte optique” at the University of Lyon (1973), while a Swiss dentist, Dr. Werner Mörmann,
from the University of Zurich, developed CEREC-1 -the first digital fingerprinting system, commercially available in
1985, designed to manufacture ceramic inlays and onlays.
A fundamental change requires a paradigm shift. If one is satisfied with one’s current practice, there is no incentive to
modify it. Let us remember how long a time we needed to accept the computer as a management tool of our dental office
activity. Now, digital dentistry allows us to collect and store accurate patient data, which was not possible before, while
X-rays and digital photography have become the norm.
CAD / CAM have generated a number of benefits, providing durable restoration services conducted on the same day
without any laboratory intervention.
Yet, there were also some difficulties related to the need to have ideal dental preparations, which doubled the dentist’s
working time on each tooth and last but not least triggered double costs and limited accessibility to CAD / CAM
technology.
The new trends pertaining to the CAD / CAM applications were formalized at the First Annual Meeting of the
International Academy for Digital Dental Medicine (IADDM) on November 13, 2015 in Zurich under the following
heading: “Digital Technology Embraces Teamwork in Dentistry “. We are now waiting for manufacturers of equipment
and materials to allow our patients easier access to digital technology.