Quebec CEREC Symposium (a.k.a. "Fast Fire with Fasbinder")

I had the opportunity to be the opening keynote at a CEREC conference in Quebec, Canada. The event was amazing and it was absolutely brilliant how the entire Patterson Canada team came together to do this event. I've attached a brief video of Friday evening's festivities to give you a glimpse of how beautifully executed the symposium was. There were some great speakers at the event, one of them being Dr. Fasbinder who I've had the pleasure of knowing for years now. He is a researcher at the University of Michigan and one of the most knowledgeable people I know when it comes to CEREC materials. We started discussing one of my favorite topics: the shortened e.max cycle. Dr. Dennis Fasbinder presented some data on the fast fire. According to his data, you have a roughly 20% loss of strength with the fast fire. His data showed that at a 28-minute firing cycle, the strength was 476 mpa. At 19 minutes it was 456. At 12:40 it was 378 and Empress CAD glazed 177. When Dr. Paul Child originally did the study, he found no loss in strength. So best case scenario you have no change in strength; worst case scenario you lose 20%. Dr. Fasbinder also stated that in his numerous ongoing clinical studies, the worst success rate with ALL materials is 96%. He and I were at dinner and we had a great discussion on how strong is strong enough. In other words, if I have a weaker material (VITA, Empress) and the lowest success rate with those materials is 96% in his studies, then isn't a supposedly "weaker" e.max with the shortened cycle at 378 mpa strong enough? My contention remains that for routine work, the roughly 8-18 minutes saved in the fast fire cycle is well worth the loss of strength (even if its 20%). That 378 is still more than twice as strong as anything else. I've asked Dennis to come on the site and discuss this as he feels that there are enough users here to collect some real world data to see if the 378 in his data is a big deal or not. But as far as I'm concerned, I have had no clinical issues with the fast fire at all.

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