Why does Done In One take a week when other offices deliver final teeth in a day?

We tried it the fast way first

When 24-hour final teeth were new, we were one of the first in the world to offer full-arch surgery to final zirconia teeth within 24 hours as a product to the public. We spoke at conferences in favor of it when most of the room disagreed.

It took about four years of doing it to see the problem. The results were good. The bite and the center line could be right. But every decision was made before you'd seen anything in your mouth. You had very little say in your own smile, and that made it hard to give people more than they expected.

Why the bite is the hard part

Right after surgery, your jaw has been open for two hours, and it's very hard to record a perfect bite in that moment.

So small adjustments are almost always needed. On finished zirconia, that means grinding, and zirconia is fussy. It has to be kept cool and wet, and small slips can leave hidden weak spots that crack much later.

That was the most common complaint we heard. The second was that people hadn't chosen their own teeth. That's our own experience rather than a study, but the order was clear.

Nobody knows what they want until they see it

You order a burger just how you like it, and it still isn't quite right when it arrives. Only you can say what's off. Teeth are like that, except you'll wear them every day and they cost as much as a car.

So we don't hand you a book of tooth shapes at your consultation. Once your first trial set goes in, people know right away what they'd change, and they couldn't have told us beforehand. With same-day final teeth, all of those choices are made before you've seen a thing.

Fixed teeth the whole time

From the day after surgery you're in fixed teeth, with a new set each day.

Each morning you get a freshly printed set with yesterday's changes. You eat, talk and live in them, then tell us what you think. We update the design and print the next one. There's no denture stage.

By the time your final zirconia teeth are milled, you and your doctor have been through several rounds together. Your final teeth are the version you both stopped wanting to change.

If you're traveling in

You stay for the week, so it's one trip.

With a temporary set now and final teeth months later, you'd have to fly back. Here the visits are short and back to back: surgery, a fitting each day, and your final teeth before you go home. Most of our patients come from out of town, and the week is built around them.

What the week looks like

About two hours on surgery day, then 30 to 45 minutes each day after for your new set.

Your total chair time for the week is a few hours. Most days your visit is shorter than a lunch break, and the rest of the day is yours.

Under our old same-day approach, surgery day ran about four and a half hours. A conversion-denture approach elsewhere commonly runs six to eight.

Short visits are easier on nervous patients too. Several of our patients arrive scared of dentists and leave less so, and we think the shape of the week is part of why.

Quick, without taking over your life

Much of this field competes on speed. We care more about how much of your life the treatment takes.

The traditional approach can stretch across most of a year of appointments, waiting and healing, and your calendar ends up belonging to the treatment. Same-day finals are quick, but they pack every decision into two long, tiring visits.

A week of short visits is done quickly and asks very little of you while it runs. Around here we say, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Take an extra day if you'd like

If you love your second set, we can go straight to final, and some people do.

Others want an extra day to eat in them, go to the beach in them and come back sure. That's fine with us. Roughly one patient in fifty arrives wanting it faster, and even they usually end up glad of the pace.

Changes go into the design file

At each try-in, your trial teeth are printed from the same design file that will make your final zirconia teeth. We make every change in that file, then mill your final teeth from the corrected design.

With same-day finals, changes are ground into the finished teeth with a drill.

A question to ask any practice

Some practices don't design teeth from scratch. They fit ready-made tooth shapes to your implant positions. That's custom to your implants, but the teeth come from a set, and the ads sound the same either way.

So ask: is the tooth design made from scratch for me, or fitted from existing shapes? Or bring a photo of your smile from twenty years ago and ask if they can design toward it. A practice designing from scratch can.

Same-day teeth can be good too

Same-day finals give good results every day, and we made plenty of them ourselves. Having done it both ways, we find the week gives people teeth they're happier with, for the cost of a few short visits.

From years of asking, almost nobody tells us they regret the money, large as it is. What they say, again and again, is that they wish they'd done it sooner.