Innovation in restorative dental materials: Another new age or the end of the line?

摘要

Dentistry has long been an acquisitive discipline, using materials and techniques developed elsewhere for its own purposes, long before the Round Table employing the principles of'adopt, adapt, improve'. Thus, the lost-wax process, poly (methyl methacrylate), agar, alginate, plaster, cobalt-chrome - and many others, were put into dental service. Sometimes idiosyncratic and personal recipes of individual practitioners, such as the many 'stoppings' of the 19th century and earlier, were further developed, the most obvious being silver amalgam. But despite the recognition of widespread deficiencies, there is a general sense of complacency even though so little has actually been developed specifically for dentistry. Walsh's turbine handpiece, Smith's polycarboxylate and Wilson's glass ionomer cement (GIC) are among the very few counterexamples. The 'personal' formulae (still not out of fashion, especially in Germany) were largely supplanted by commercial production from 1850 or so, but independent product assessment did not occur until around 1900, with standardization starting in about 1930.