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Description:
The use of Microscope-level magnification (6-8x or greater) combined with head-mounted, co-axial illumination provides a tremendous improvement in a dentist's ability to extract teeth compared to if the dentist used unaided vision and non-coaxial operatory lighting. This presentation describes precisely in what ways high magnification and co-axial lighting provides advantages when extracting teeth. Magnification provides an improved ability to know where to section teeth and remove intra-socket bone, and greatly improves a dentist's ability to determine if elevators that are positioned around tooth particles are contributing to incremental improvements in the luxation of tooth particles. Microscopic differences in how elevators are placed around tooth particle perimeters affect the extent to which a certain way of placing an elevator around a tooth particle is resulting in microscopic incremental improvements in tooth particle luxation. A key concept is that the accumulation of microscopic incremental improvements in tooth particle luxation results in MACROscopic movements of tooth particles. And the key to sensing if microscopic incremental improvements in luxation are occurring is, simply, for a dentist to be able to view the extraction site using microscope-level magnification and head-mounted lighting. The unaided vision dentist cannot sense these microscopic incremental improvements in the magnitude and direction of tooth particle luxation, resulting less efficient use of elevators.