Independent news, insights, profiles, and recognition for modern dentistry.
Latest edition · September 3, 2026
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The referral has not disappeared. It has been rewritten by systems that summarize a practice before a patient ever visits its website — and that increasingly decide which practices get described at all.
Diagnostic software is now good enough to be worth arguing about. The arguments that matter are about liability, workflow, and who is accountable when the machine is right.
Single-visit restorations were a clinical success and a financial disappointment for two decades. What changed was not the mill.
A minority of well-equipped practices have started deliberately delaying adoption. Their argument is not nostalgia — it is that the first three years of any dental technology are paid for by patients.
Hardware cost has fallen far enough to stop being the barrier. What replaced it is a set of integration problems that no vendor has an incentive to solve.
Regulators have approved a growing number of assistive imaging tools while declining to approve autonomous ones. The distinction is doing more work than most practices realize.
