Inside the Digital Workflow: Dr. Miles Cone on 3D Printing Success

If you get a printer, you're definitely at the cutting edge of where the digital technology is. Most people don't have it. What I wish people would know is that it's really not as difficult as you think that it is. This was one of the things that I wish I had done. Same with the scanning. I wish I got into it three, four years ago. Welcome to the Phil Klein Dental Podcast. Today, we've got a great episode for you. Our guest is Dr. Miles Cohn, a highly respected prosthodontist, educator, and speaker who's truly embraced digital dentistry, especially 3D printing. Dr. Cohn shares how bringing a 3D printer into his practice has completely transformed the way he works, making things more efficient, productive, and yes, even more profitable. He talks about how this technology has opened the door to do things differently, from quickly fabricating models and occlusal guards to whitening trays and provisionals, all in-house and often the same day. He'll also share what to look for when choosing a printer and reveal his personal favorite and why. According to Dr. Cohn, 3D printing isn't just the future. It's a total game changer in how we practice dentistry today. Dr. Cohn is a board-certified prosthodontist and certified dental technician. He graduated from Tufts University School of Dental Medicine and completed a three-year prosthodontic residency with the United States Army. He is the owner of Nuance Dental Specialists, a private practice in Yarmouth, Maine. Before we bring in our guest, I do want to say that if you're enjoying these episodes and want to support the show, please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You'll be the first to know about our new releases and our entire production team will really appreciate it. Dr. Cohn, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you. Glad to be back again. Yeah, I mean, I'm telling you, you're like a rock star lately. You did a... webinar for us miles and uh dr cohen i'll call you dr cohen i won't tell you what my wife calls yeah so okay all right so i'll go between miles and dr cohen but we're friends um october 1st you did a really sensational webinar the visuals were so beautiful that I had this conflict between paying attention to the artistic value of your presentation versus actually the dental information that was coming through. So anybody that wants to watch that webinar, watch it twice, once for the visual. amazing work that Dr. Cohn did. He actually, he does that himself. It's called From Scan to Smile, Leveraging Intraoral Scanning and 3D Printing Technology to Enhance Patient Care and Boost Dental Practice ROI. Again, it was given live on October 1st. You can watch it on Viva Learning. Just go to the search box and type in C-O-N-E and you'll see it there. It's sponsored by DMG. We thank DMG for that. Phenomenal, really, Dr. Cohn. It was really impressive. Anyway. Well, thank you very much, Phil. And, you know, we talked a lot about digital technology in the past and 3D printing is something that I'm still. i would say my infancy and so putting that presentation together you know as at the outset starting back a few months it kind of forced me to do some things you know to generate content for this and in the beginning starting with 3d printing was a little bit scary because you know it's just me i'm a lab technician but it's it's new i'm i'm from the stone age you know i still well you're a prosthodontist lab technician board certified prosthodontist yeah so yes you know what's interesting is you were for a long time in fact your whole career an analog guy right i mean you were straight analog right and one day you just woke up after being at a dental convention i guess uh with the help of your wife who's your business manager and partner um and she convinced you that You know, you need to start looking into digital workflow more attentively and learning what's out there. And you just hit it full force. I mean, you stepped on the throttle and you're speeding around the racetrack right now. When did you make that change, that transition from analog to digital? And tell us about that short runway where you've really accelerated to the point where you can't live without it. Yeah, so, and I know we've talked about this before. So it started with the intraoral scanner. I think that's where most people... begin when they think of digital dentistry, right? It's a scanner. And there's so many different companies that have scanners. And we brought in multiple companies to our office to try them out. My wife was tired of me pouring models till seven, eight at night, missing soccer games, missing piano recitals. And when I would go to the lecture, I think this was at Chicago Midwinter one year, she went along with me. So of course, I'm on the stage lecturing. She's going to the vendor booths. And she came back and she said, you know, when I came with you here a few years ago, everything was analog. Now it's like one in four booths is analog. Everything else is printer, scanner. So that's where we started. She brought some folks in and I was hooked. And I had tried digital dentistry in the past and it didn't quite work for me. And I thought, of course, it was user error. Turns out it was some of the products I was using. We got a scanner in, you know that I'm a, I'm a three shaped guy, but in this day and age, all the scanners out there are pretty good. Whether you have a prime scan, a meta, they're all pretty good. And so that started 2023, like new year, 2023. So again, I'm only a couple of years into this and really not even three years in. And that changed our practice when we started looking at our P&L statements month to month. And then it was year to year. You know, I remember Cornelia coming to me saying, like, we're 36 percent ahead of where we were last year. You know, and the patient turnaround was quick. We were a lot more efficient. We were a lot happier. We had more free time. And the crazy thing was, yeah, we were making more money, but also we weren't treating it like a shortcut. We were the patient outcomes were better. And the two of us have talked about this many times before, how you feel digital dentistry has really expanded your practice. It's not only made what you're currently doing more efficient, but you've added more services or you've added services more frequently to more of your patients of record. And obviously that's going to lead to a more productive, profitable practice. Let's talk about the printer for a few minutes. You know, the printer is the next sensible thing to implement into the digital workflow once you have the iOS. And some doctors really embrace that printer. They love it. They can't live without it. They get a couple of them, maybe three, and they're off to the races with the printer. Some find it a little bit more involved than they anticipated, you know, with using the materials, with the curing, with the washing and all the other steps. But you've got it down to a science and you went through that learning curve and you find it, based on what I'm hearing from you, indispensable. So tell us your experience with the 3D printer. Like many dentists, we started with the mindset, OK, so you've got a scanner. That's step one. And then after a little bit of time, you grow into it and you think, hey, what if I could make my own stuff? And so naturally, you think I'll get a milling machine. I'll start milling out my own crowns. We did that for a little while. But then the time investment that took, the footprint that that milling machine took up on my benchtop, it was more effort than the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. Let's just say that. and so then again i got to give all credit to my wife phil you know she's a smart one of the two of us in the office so so she had looked into printing and she said you know have you ever thought about a printer and i said you know i i've thought about it i've looked into it but We started looking into it really in earnest after Rune Fisker, who was, you know, high in the ranks at 3Shape. There was a blog that he had talking about 2025 digital technology trends. You know, one of those was AI, which everybody's, whether you know it or not, you're probably using AI in your practice. And then one of the other ones was this wave of 3D printing. and how that was going to be the future rather than milling. And I started to notice, yeah, I actually wasn't really milling that much. And I just had this thing that was becoming just obnoxious in my practice. Right, but the milling though is related to actually creating an indirect restoration. Whereas a printing, we're not at the level yet. And that was it. So yeah, the milling unit was essentially a one trick pony. I could create an indirect definitive restoration. I could create temps with it too, but that took, you know, if you're going to spend the time making the temp, just make the final, you know, I, so that was, I just, I didn't use that at all. So we started looking into printing, same thing. We invited a bunch of different companies and had, you know, and we've got connections with people all over the dental. So we talked to different companies. They gave us their pitch, the pros, the benefits. And we ultimately settled on the DMG printer, the RS5, which is the printer is manufactured in Germany by a company called Rapid Shape. Phenomenal, phenomenal printer. The build quality of this printer is second to none. And there's a lot of printers out there. And we tested them. We looked at them. saw what they were producing, and this was kind of a no-brainer. So when you made that final decision, Dr. Cohn, what was the criteria that you used to say, okay, I want to go with this? What were the parameters that you used to evaluate it? Yeah, well, so the quality was great. We knew the quality was great. But then we did our due diligence. And because I'm a lab technician, we've got so many friends and colleagues in that realm. So I called up four or five of my lab buddies. I said, hey, no jokes. You know, what printers do you guys use? And of course, they had, you know, Carbon, Asiga, you know. And then they started mentioning Rapid Shape. And I was like, do you mean three shape? They were like, no, Rapid Shape. And I was like, what's Rapid Shape? And they were like, oh, it's a printer out of Germany. and this is what it does and i said okay well tell me about each of these and they would give me their pros and cons of each and what i heard pretty consistently across the board was that the rapid shape printers had remarkably few errors um very little uh maintenance that was required they were pretty automated it came with its own wash and cure unit um yeah the build quality was phenomenal but then of course as a prosthodontist i was like yeah but how does the how do the models look how does the what's the resolution like how precise how accurate and they said that that was the big thing for them that of all their printers this one had some of the best accuracy some of the best detail that as a prosthodontist i would i would truly appreciate so when you were thinking see it yeah when you were thinking about buying a printer or integrating a printer into your practice what was the first thing that came to your mind as far as what you're going to use that printer for Oh, model work. That's it. And that's what I thought. We got this in. And I was like, okay, cool. Because right now, I've got digital impressions, right? So I send the impressions off, digital scans. And I was having outsourcing laboratories locally, some across, you know, halfway across the country. And I would have them manufacture these 3D models for me. Then they'd send them back in the mail. And from those models, then I'd make bleaching trays. I'd have them make me night guards. I would have them make me temporaries, these big full-arch implant temps for try-ins, digital dentures. There's all kinds of things that they were doing. And of course, my wife was like, If you had a printer, couldn't we just do that? I thought, yeah, we just certainly could. So having that ability to print the models, besides getting rid of the mess of alginate, which was something you probably really appreciated, how did that affect the efficiency of the practice? Like the productivity by having the ability to print those models versus you'd have to wait a few days, but the other way. Oh, a few days. And that was usually with a rush. You know what I mean? So we would scan, say it was a Monday and I scan the patient, even if I could send it immediately, say, you know, patient left and it's near real time. So say I hit like send, it goes to the lab. You're looking at least maybe Thursday morning, Friday afternoon, but I'm spending 40 bucks per model, maybe $25 for a rush fee. And then the worst part of it was, is, you know, I'm in New England. So we get nor'easters that come through, we get dumped on the snow, at least. three or four times a year, there's a delay in the post. And as we speak right now, Phil, just before we get on this call, I got messages from the laboratory that I use in Canada that some of the stuff that they sent me back is delayed. And those are special night guards that I make from time to time. And I thought, you know, and it's things like that that I think. why would I, I could just do this myself. And if I just had it in house, there's no delays. We can prime the pump. I can get patients in sooner. I can make the experience much easier, especially night guards. You know, as a prosthodontist, I'm doing these big full mouth cases. And when I do that scan after those crowns go in same day, I don't, I always get. a knot in my stomach when i send the patient off and i say hey come back in a week and i'll have your night guard like they might chip something during that time they might break something i can do same day dentistry now with night guards where they leave with the night guard i'll say hey go grab a coffee we're gonna let that cement set up a little bit you come back in an hour i'm gonna have your night guard so you're saying you want to create a night guard once you've delivered the prosthesis yeah and so same day that so that has now become one of the big things that i i never anticipated so for the first maybe two two and a half months i was pretty much just printing models and once i kind of found my footing once i got my my groove and my mojo with printing models and i had a whole system the way i was cleaning it you know i got to the point where i would scan do the design and the software you know hit print it would print i would clean you know a patient would be in the chair i'd quickly throw it in the cleaner throw it in the curing unit and then it was done you know and this this became super easy and now it just became second nature and just in the background you know and at the end of the day i'm like oh my gosh i've got seven eight nine models here and you think about if that was alginate and stone oh my gosh it would never work so what do you say dr cohen to a dentist who says you know i don't want to turn my office into a lab i've been accustomed to sending everything out to a lab i get it when i get it And I make it work. But meanwhile, I could focus on clinical dentistry and I don't have to worry about fabricating things in the office. Because from what I hear, this dentist's argument continues, is that there's volatile materials you have to deal with. There's maintenance of the printer. There's washing of the device or model. There's curing. It's not like print. It's not like push the button print and there it is. So it was, you know, for me, it was a little bit of practice. And so, you know, in our office, it's myself and my wife. My wife's the practice manager and I'm the lone doctor. So we don't have staff that we could delegate this to. And so that definitely influences, you know, some of the things that we make, the way that we are doing dentistry in our office. So, of course, I have to do everything myself. But that's great, you know, because, again, as an educator, when I go out, I can. train staff i can train dentists who want to do this for me it's very cathartic to make stuff and to get my hand i that's why i'm a lab tech that's why i'm a prosthodontist but i like to your point not everybody wants to do that like a lot of people don't want to do that the steps are super easy it took me in earnest working with this maybe three or four days you know where i was kind of like where's the where's the alcohol and where's the you know how do i carry this how do i move it from this you know been over to this drawer without like dripping you know and now that i've got it down it's so easy and i think back to the early you know the first couple days where i was kind of all thumbs with it you know you know and you know those initial prints probably took me an hour and a half from from start to finish And in the early days, I thought, God, if this is how it's going to be, I don't know that this would be sustainable. Now I've got, yeah, now I've got this. So you're someone that doesn't even have a staff to help you with these steps. Correct. And you work through it fairly seamlessly. It's so fast. So the advantages of having a printer, in your mind, far outweigh any of the perceived disadvantages that I just kind of enumerated before. Right. And it's the same thing if you think about like a scanner, you know, to that level, like, oh, but you mean I got to like change the tip? Oh, you mean I got to put a battery in? Oh, you mean I got to like log in? It's similar to that. Like you're just doing it second nature and you're like multitasking, doing other things. And that's kind of what I was saying. By the end of the day, I've got. you know, maybe like 10 to 12 models, like done, completed. And I look at the time and you're doing these because it's running in the background. It's not like you have to monitor it. It's not like you have to do anything. Once you hit a couple of buttons, it's kind of automated. It kind of goes on its own. So you mentioned that your wife mentioned there's a 36% increase in revenue year over year. Yeah. So, well, that was from scanning when we were initially scanning, you know, when we first started she said you know we're turning around cases so much faster we've got better cases and a big part of that came from case acceptance too you know when people would see um their teeth on the scan and you know you'd send them images and now there's that decay that it was even as a And photographer, even as somebody who's a professional photographer, it was difficult for me to share with them images on like a second molar on the lingual surface where there was the, you know. So those scans really helped with the buy-in for patients because now they see that image. They're like, well, I got to get that fixed. So you mentioned, Dr. Cohn, that the first thing you were focused on when you were thinking about getting a printer. was getting rid of the alginate and the mixing bowls and all the mess and the dust and printing your models. And I guess that's typical for most dentists that embark on this new technology of 3D printing in the office. What's the next step in the timeline of utilization of a 3D printer? And how does that affect the services that you're offering to your patients along with productivity slash practice profitability? Sure. So yeah, the first thing for us was just the models. And right off the bat, every model that we printed saved us 35 40 bucks right but not only the the money but the time because if i saw a patient on monday the models were printed that same day i could see them back the next day you know with those models in hand i could and initially i was so it was models and bleaching trays i was making my own suck down bleaching trays And so that was really, really easy. That was really fast. I didn't have to outsource that anymore because when we made the decision to go digital, we stopped using stone. So I was having laboratories fabricate night guards, not night guards, but bleaching trays for me. So there was just this long delay. And you know with bleaching, people want it yesterday. Right. So almost every patient in your practice would probably say yes to bleaching to some extent. I mean, you don't have to go marketing that to outsiders that are not current. patients of record you're using your patients of record and saying hey i can make you a bleaching tray two trays to take home with you while i do an in-office bleaching and you're going to have really beautiful so yeah tell us about that process so that was yeah so it started with like the models and then i was like okay now that we got these models we have patients that are doing in-office bleaching all the time and so for the in-office bleaching you know from the time they sit down in the chair you make the chit chat with them you get them comfortable You've leaned them back. You've got the cool dam on. You've got the optra gate, whatever it is. You know, you're like, it's a 45, 55 minute ordeal. You know, they're getting up. They're getting ready to leave. You give them a little toothbrush to clean up. They check themselves out in the mirror. You do a couple of portrait shots. It's all good. So by the time they're leaving, when we do that, I scan them before we started. My wife can then run up to our laboratory. We have two floors. So she runs up to the laboratory with the computer. and then she can quickly design a model print the model and do a suck down tray in about 37 minutes i think we've at our we're about about 37 minutes she can just motor through that so two trays 37 minutes and by the time the patient's you know getting up from the chair fixing their hair they've got the in-office bleaching they've got two uh custom take-home trays with a box of bleach so that we turned you know maybe a 600 visit into a 1200 visit and that is huge and it's great because making those models making those bleaching trays that's something that i don't need to do that can be easily delegated and if you have a printer in your office i could teach anybody how to do that and give me a half hour i'll teach you so how is that affected your bleaching business in your office by having the printer are you doing more bleaching or is it just faster anybody who's listening to this knows you always get patients in and they've kicked the can down the road for a while and oh gosh they come in to see you you know for that first visit that first console and it's like a monday or tuesday they have a wedding coming up saturday in the past there's no way maybe i could have done the in office and i would have gotten paid for the in office and it's all good but they would opt out of doing the custom bleaching trays because there's not enough time and afterwards it's it's not it's not beneficial but now we can do that we can provide that service for them and say all right if you want to get really white you want to maintain and it's an easy sell because we strike while the iron's high we've had patients cancel they're like hey you know what i'm fine with the novice let's just not i'm i don't i'm out of town and we that's the thing phil Being in Portland, well, I guess we're in Yarmouth now, but Portland, Maine, we get a lot of folks coming in here. It's vacation land. So they come here to visit during the summer. They're here in the wintertime for winter break. Their kids go to college here. And we get a lot of these folks that are only in town for a few days. And so, you know, it's great if you can make them those trays while they're here. And patients are impatient, right? They want to start yesterday. They want to begin now. And that's a recurrent business revenue flow. Yeah. that's the thing and that's you know what my wife said is you know for some of these patients uh we'll do say like we do a veneer somebody comes in we do a single veneer great and say you get 1500 bucks 2000 bucks for that veneer you know after you've subtracted the lab cost after you subtracted the cost of the consumables if i did that veneer right or that crown whatever it is i'm probably not redoing it again for maybe 20 years 15 20 years if we do whitening on these patients that generates revenue consistently throughout the year because every three months you know they need to they need to do a touch-up they need to whiten because that tooth becomes the canary in the coal mine they have essentially a an ageless tooth right that tooth if we if we saw them at 25 when they're 35 they still have that single central veneer we did is still 25 years old you know so When they look in the mirror, you know, 18 months down the road, six months down the road, three months, depending on how much coffee and red wine they drink, they're going to notice that their adjacent teeth have discolored a little bit. Well, Miles come to the rescue. We have bleaching trays and we discuss this with them well in advance before we start that treatment. And I guess having a printer is definitely helpful if you have to replace that tray on short notice, whether the tray broke or it doesn't fit anymore for whatever reason, having a printer. And you just need that STL file and you can go to town. So if they aren't changing the topography of their teeth, if they don't get additional, even sometimes small fillings, you know, small, we've done small occlusal fillings on patients like a little class five. Those trays are flexible enough that it doesn't doesn't really affect it that much. You know, and now if they did a bridge or an implant or, you know, something in that arch that dramatically changed, then we may need to make them. But the beauty. of that is as if something changes again we can make it for them same day if i'm the one that's doing the crown i can do a quick scan you know or if they we have a lot of patients that snowboard if they're down in florida or san diego you know wherever they are tucson any dentist that has a scanner you know i can contact that dentist and say hey could you just please send me that stl file and i can you know if the patient's traveling you know from boca raton back to back to maine before they even get here i've got their tray done you know, without seeing them in office. And it's awesome. So you're looking at models, you're looking at whitening trays, you're looking at night guards, occlusal guards. What else are you using the printer for? You know, during the webinar, what we talked about was, and this is maybe sort of like a hybrid version of that, is a lot of times I'll be out of the office lecturing. My wife will be here and we get patients that just stop in all the time. Somebody will come in. And they'll say, oh my gosh, I broke this tooth. I bit into an olive. I thought it was pitted. Surprise, it wasn't. And my tooth cracked. Cornelia can just do a quick scan. She can send me those scans because of the app that I have, the Three Shape Unite app that I have. I can see those almost instantaneously on my phone. So if I'm on the airplane, my wife will say, Miles, does this look like, is this an extraction? Is this something you can fix? In the case that I showed the webinar, I was like, oh yeah, this is totally doable. So hey. Send this STL file, send that scan to the lab right now. You know, say this is like Monday afternoon and the patient comes in. I say, tell the patient to come back Tuesday, first thing in the morning. Tell her to be here 8 a.m. Tell the lab we need this design done in the next, you know, like three hours. They do a digital wax up. Yeah, they do a digital wax up. They send it to me. Again, I've just landed back in like, you know, I'm in like Atlanta or I'm in Houston, wherever I am. I'm in route back to Maine. I see that digital wax up. I say, yeah, approve it. Good to go. They send the file to me. It's in my Dropbox. It's in my email, whatever it is. I get back to Portland, you know, maybe 730, 830 at night on that Monday. My wife comes and picks me up. you know we go home when i get to the office the next day my wife has already printed out that 3d model of the wax up the putty matrix is already ready to go we hit the ground running month you know tuesday morning when that patient comes in we prep that tooth for for a crown even if it's just a temporary even if you know it's going to break and we permanently bond a temporary crown on there and we save the day that's you get to do hero dentistry to save the day with pros sometimes. And that's the thing, having that lab, having that digital component in the past, that lab would have, you know, if they'd done a traditional wax up, it would have taken maybe a couple of weeks. They would have taken some time to send it to us. You know, and meanwhile, that patient is long gone. They're back home in Iowa or California, wherever they were. But because, you know, from the time they saw my wife to the time I put that temp on less than 24 hours, you know, that's phenomenal service to offer to people. And because I have that ability, you know that patient's probably called two or three other offices most of the offices are like oh maybe we can get you in friday you know for an emergency maybe you know most offices are probably like i'll get you in a month you know yeah but we're like yeah i can see you tomorrow i can squeeze you in and because you know we have this printer now we can do that so you're doing stuff preemptively, you're doing things before the patient even comes back, which is really amazing. So as we get to the bottom of this podcast, Dr. Cohn, if you would share with our listeners some of the caveats that they should keep in mind when it comes to using a printer, maybe even share with us some of the mistakes you made before you perfected your whole system in your office with 3D printing. And that's, you know, largely why I like to speak and lecture and do these podcasts and webinars so I can... tell people about the mistakes that i've made and i do make a lot and tell them about the successes i've had and so with the printing this was one of the things that i i wish i had done same with the scanning i wish i got into it three four years ago and when i whenever i go lecture phil and i ask folks hey who's got a scanner it's probably nine out of ten people in the audience most people have two or three scanners hey who's got a printer you know if it's if it's an audience of a hundred maybe 12 15 hands ago maybe even now you know even now yeah it's very it's not much it's not much so if you get a printer you're definitely at the cutting edge of where the digital technology is most people don't have it and what i what i wish people would know is that it's really not as difficult as you think that it is and something to look look at is the customer service dmg has in my opinion some of the best customer service of any company I've ever worked with. And I use them for multiple things. Like in the presentation I showed, we use Luxa Crown, we use Luxa Temp, we use Icon, we use Honeygum. We have a lot of their products in our office already. The printer was a seamless addition that I, again, I wish I had added it. I feel like I'd have to look at the numbers. Cornelia, my wife has got the numbers. I feel like we paid this off within the first maybe three to four months. For the first month, I... kind of didn't know what i was doing with it i and i didn't use it nearly as much at the time because i was myself reading the instructions and watching the youtube videos and and by the way let me say this the dmg folks came for like two to three days for the setup and they ran through all their software all the procedures and for me it was in like one year well they want they wanted you to make sure you do it right because you're they want to make sure you're an influential key opinion you're a key opinion leader yeah they were listening They did their part. I was kind of... Now, do they provide that kind of service for a dentist who's just buying a printer? They're not going to spend two days there. I suspect that they provide a lot of on-site training for that dentist. That's good to hear. I think that they really want you to be able to use this. So knowing what I know now, I could show somebody how to use this thing in like 30 minutes. Yeah. Now, there are some dentists that I've talked to that actually say they print the most beautiful provisionals. are you doing that so we have printed provisional so if you look at if you watch the webinar the very end you know we're using photogrammetry with our lab we're doing some things and they will send me an stl file that i can then just print out and so again that saves time it saves money makes for a seamless experience with the patient i start with baby steps you know i was printing just the models and then you start doing other things and um And you really have to look at the materials. That was the other thing that I wanted, you know, anybody who's listening. There's a lot of options out there, you know, and there's a lot of companies that make printers that maybe aren't dental companies. I won't mention names, you know, and you'll see a lot of lab technicians using these because they've got three or four printers, you know, so they have to, they buy a less expensive printer that's maybe not dental and isn't validated necessarily for those resins. So just be careful. I wanted to get a company that had a good reputation. I wanted to get a company that also I knew that other companies had invested in as well. So I mentioned Strauman. Strauman has also put their branding with Rapid Shape. Strauman feels that highly of Rapid Shape that they're like, oh, we want to put our skin on the Rapid Shape too. So it's not just DMG. This is a hype printer. You want this printer. And you want to get it yesterday. I promise you, when you start using this, you will find so... It's not a one-trick pony like the scanning. You can do... We're doing custom... Oh, you asked what we're doing. We're doing custom trays now. We're doing denture try-ins. We'll print out a mock-up for denture try-ins. Provisionals, night guards, they're going out of style. And by the way... Per night guard, we're spending a couple bucks because a bottle of the resin to make the night guards might be a little over 400 bucks, but I can print 150 night guards. I haven't even finished the bottle, the original bottle that DMG gave me or the Ortho Plus. I'm still using it. But it's an open source printer. the purchase the person who owns that printer could use any material pretty much right any material yeah and you know in dmg was the one who turned me on to this because i remember when i when i first wanted to make my my uh provisionals when i first want to start getting into that i was like hey what's on your website i can't find the provisional material and they said oh well a good one to go with is gc they've got this product called like temp print you should try and i again i speak for gc i didn't even know about that that's how you know green i was about printing so i called up the folks at gc um they sold me a bottle of their uh temperant and so that's what we use now And because, again, because it's open source, there's like 200 different resins. So that's kind of an important factor to have a printer where you could choose and you're not locked into the materials that are made by the manufacturer of the printer. And again, DMG is the distributor, one of several distributors in the United States for rapid shape. Yeah. It's like anything else, Dr. Cohn. you just got to have an open mind. You're still a young guy, but you're not 20 years old. So you've been doing this a while. You were an archaeologist. You were in the army. You were a certified dental ceramist. You're a prosthodontist. I don't know how you have time to do anything else besides start new careers. But what's interesting is you're open-minded and you made that switch from analog to digital and then you just embraced it and you were off to the races. And I think it's... Most of the limitations on anybody related to anything are self-imposed. If you feel overwhelmed, you know, I don't know if I can learn this. My staff is not used to doing this. You know, you're not going to do anything new. You're going to be doing the same old thing forever. Dentistry is just changing so quickly. When I got out of dental school, we were still doing amalgams, direct filling gold, and even endodontics, there wasn't even a microscope when I got out. So we're going back a while. Yeah. Yeah. You're dating yourself. I don't care. At this point, as long as my wife doesn't care, I don't care. Yeah, that's what happens. Yeah, right. So I feel good. I eat well. I'm enjoying what I'm doing. Age is not a big deal to me. But the exciting thing is trying something new. And thank God there are people out there like you, Dr. Cohn, who teaches in such a compelling way with your visual presentations and your enthusiasm that dentists and dental hygienists and assistants can learn from your adventures in getting into new stuff and new techniques and new materials, because that's what makes life fun. Plus, it's better for the patient. You're doing so many great things for the patient. Yeah. And you know what's interesting, Phil, is that once we started doing this and symposiums and study clubs started finding out that, oh, Miles is doing printing now? We have been getting so many invites to come do this. So this is going to keep growing. So I'm very curious. You know, I'm going to come back and listen to this podcast one year. I got on my phone as a reminder. Go back and listen to this podcast because I'm certain that I'll say, gosh, I was only doing custom trays and night guard, you know, and bleaching. And that's it. And now, you know, a year from now, what will be exciting, too, is to see. What else can be printed? Yeah, well, we're going to have you back in, you know, 2026. This is late 2025. So we'll have you back in 2026 to update us. But yeah, I mean, some dentists are saying, I don't want to buy a printer until I can print a restoration. When they come out with materials that compete with zirconia or lithium disilicate, and I could print it right there in the office, I'm in. But until then, it's not so exciting for me. But, you know. they haven't heard your story but how close are they are printing zirconia in europe now though yeah so they've got some there are some printers out there that can print certain materials that are um like a mix of resin that are a mix of ceramic um i don't know that i would do that i'm not saying it i think it's i think it's cool i think it's definitely cool i wouldn't do that yet in my practice as a definitive restoration let me just let me just say that both from a standpoint of aesthetics and strength from both both sides or maybe the aesthetics they could do but the strength not yeah for a long-term provisional sure 100 you know we have patients our treatments are so protracted we have patients in treatment for you know a year and a half two years or more you know with all the stuff they're getting done that would be a great option to print out some of that stuff you know but for a long term if it was my mouth like I'm doing ceramic. I don't know that I would do that. But if you have a 75-year-old guy or woman who doesn't want to spend a lot of money, you could do something where you could print it and save them a lot of money. And if it breaks, you just put it, if it breaks, you print another one. Yeah. And like, what's the big deal, right? Yeah. And again, you know that our practice model is a little bit different than most others, you know? So I think for a lot of practices, that probably would be a great thing if you could print out some sort of like a... you know, hybrid definitive restoration. I think that could be great. Yeah. So printing is exciting. Yeah. And I'm curious to see where this goes in the next year or so. Anecdotally, having had a milling machine and having had a printer, there was a lot of maintenance and upkeep on the milling machine as well. And so I know that that was consuming a lot of my time. When we had the milling machine, we did have an assistant. We had an assistant for a hot minute who's now a second year student, dental student at Tufts, by the way. We're super proud of her. But she was doing a lot of the behind the scenes. And I just thought, gosh, like. This is a lot of upkeep. And when something, when a spindle goes or, you know, it's difficult, it's expensive, it's costly. It's kind of like having, you know, that sports car, that high-end European sports car. It looks great. It's cool to have. But man, when it goes down, it's... Yeah. And when you think about it, the big selling point back then, the blitzkrieg of marketing was your patients are going to get their crowns in one day. And it turns out the demand for one-day dentistry wasn't what they thought it would be. All right, Dr. Cohn, out of time, but great discussion. And we hope to have you back on another program real soon. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you, Phil. Appreciate it, as always.