512. Dr. Robert B. Kerstein, DMD

Email: bidemiologunde@gmail.com

In this episode, host Bidemi Ologunde speaks with Dr. Robert B. Kerstein (DMD), a pioneer in computerized bite analysis and digital occlusal technology, about how dentistry can move beyond subjective guesswork toward more precise, data-driven treatment. What does a patient's bite reveal about TMJ symptoms, headaches, prosthesis failure, and overall comfort? Why does much of dentistry still rely on outdated methods when real-time digital measurements are available? And how can tools like T-Scan help clinicians improve outcomes while reducing treatment time?

Dr. Kerstein earned his D.M.D. in 1983 and his Prosthodontic certificate in 1985 from Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, where he later served as a clinical professor of Fixed and Removable Prosthodontics for 13 years. Beginning in 1984, he has studied every generation of T-Scan technology, from the original T-Scan 1 to the current T-Scan 10 Novus, and over the past four decades has become the leading authority in Computerized Occlusal Analysis. He has published extensively in leading dental journals and edited nine research volumes on T-Scan applications. A pioneer and academic advocate for digital occlusal technology, Dr. Kerstein teaches a measured, data-driven approach that improves bite-related treatment outcomes, enhances patient comfort, reduces prosthesis failure and remakes, and shortens overall treatment time.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

So thank you for joining me once again on another episode of the Beat Picture Podcast. I have a special guest from up in Boston, Massachusetts. Over to you, sir.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

I'm Dr. Robert Kirsten from Boston, Massachusetts. I'm uh I'm happy to be here to talk about T-scan and byte health and all the things that you're interested in.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Nice, nice. So um, for people who are meeting you for the first time, who are listening to you for the first time, um, what has kept you focused on byte analysis for over 40 years?

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Well, it's because I was exposed to it at its infancy in 1984, when the first T-scan computer was built, I happened to be in the uh Tufts Procedonic program uh specializing in bridges and caps, and we had one because my teacher built it, and he built it with some MIT engineers. So I had access to it from its infancy, and I saw that it was even in its infancy, T-scan 1, we're now on to T-scan 10, it was much better for the patients and for the dentists to use computer information about bite force than the paper and ink that's still being used today. And so when I started using it and studying it and see what it could do to help patients quickly get rid of bite problems like TMJ problems or headaches or grinding their teeth, even in its infancy, 1990, 1987, 1995, it was capable of solving a lot of bite problems that traditional occlusion methodology couldn't solve and didn't have answers for.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

So this topic is actually very um important to me because over the past two years I was fortunate enough to be able to see an orthodontist to check out what's going on with my teeth. And they did a few scans. I didn't pay attention to the equipment used, but now that I'm talking to you, I'm starting to think back. Next time I go to my orthodontist, I'm gonna start asking them questions. So they took some scans and I did some x-rays, and I stood in front of a machine, uh spun around my head, and then back and forth, and then they were like, Oh, you need to do a few things to correct your bite and also to make sure your airflow, my airflow was, you know, fixed and so on and so on. And I was thinking, apparently, there's a lot of things going on in the human mouth or the jaw specifically that affects health. Am I correct in describing it that way?

SPEAKER_01 3:13

Yes. Very true. It has to do with the neurology of the teeth and the need to swallow as a human being, which we do thousands of times a day. We actually swallow not only to chew food or to digest food, but to lubricate our throat and to keep our oral function uh moist, and yet swallowing is at the core of many problems that people have with bite alignment and with TMJ symptoms. And um so, yes, there's whole health issues. Um in simple terms, the neurology of the teeth uh talks directly to the brain, and it actually talks by outputting electrical activity into the brain. And when it does that, it makes the brain uh respond poorly in many ways. And that can be imposture. People can have like uneven shoulders because of that electricity coming from their teeth, or they can have pa facial pain because their muscles hurt from that electricity coming from the teeth and making the muscles work too hard. And so the electrical output from the teeth and the neurologic tying to the brain affects people's general well-being. And uh to show you how powerful it is uh with the T scan, we just uh published a study where we adjust the person's bite uh uh uh with the T-scrix, which is a very special way to adjust the bite, high precision microcomputer guided adjusting of the friction on the teeth. And we reduce the subject pool in this study of 30 subjects, we reduce their salivary cortisol by 50 percent. Cortisol is a stress hormone, and people who have jaw problems or bite problems often have high salivary cortisol. And it's because their teeth are causing it electrically in the brain to stimulate its release by stressing the brain. The electricity actually stresses the brain. So only with uh computer-guided micro high precision bite adjusting can you control, can control brain function and improve the physiology of swallowing, and improves the physiology of chewing, takes away headaches, facial pain, um, reduces stress, stops to go from clenching and grinding. So those are the things that uh it uh why it's a whole health issue. It's the neurology of the teeth that causes many of the problems that people have with their with their health of their head and neck region.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

Wow, wow, because apparently I I grind my teeth. I used to grind my teeth when I was sleeping. I didn't know that until I went to see the orthodontist, and then it was actually showing me images of my own molars saying this is evidence of grinding. Do you grind you? He even asked if I go boxing, if I'm a professional boxer. And I was like, No, I play sports, but not boxing. Not sports that make me grind my teeth while playing the sports. If anything, when I play basketball, I wear mouth guards, and then he asked, Do I wear mouth guards to sleep? So I was like, No. Then he was like, Okay, we need to get you started on the aligners, and then I wear aligners now, and I wear mouth guards when I sleep, and any sporting activities, I actually wear, you know, dental guards to protect against grinding because that could cause fractures and chips on the back tooth. And it was just so many things I didn't know I needed to learn just for the teeth. And it's just so fascinating. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Well, you weren't aware of grinding your teeth, and I would bet that the damage to your teeth that you were shown is not from grinding your teeth, it's not from playing sports, it's from you using your teeth every day. And the function or the friction that's there that is why you might be grinding your teeth causes damage, and the patient doesn't know it. If you were grinding your teeth, you'd wake up in the morning, your jaw would hurt, and your head would hurt, and you'd be complaining about like, I can't open my mouth, it's too tight, my muscles are too tight. And your wife would know you were grinding your teeth because she'd hear you, right? So a lot of tooth damage that looks like you might be grinding your teeth is actually functional tooth destruction, meaning you chew, eat, and swallow thousands of times a day, and the action of that, because of the friction on the teeth and the neurology talking to the brain, firing the muscles of your jaw, they squeeze harder on your teeth and they sand the pieces away while you're using your teeth normally. You would know if you were grinding your teeth. So the second aspect of what you just described to me, it's great you wear sports mouth guards and you do protect your teeth during sports. Um, what the dent what the dentist was getting at, the orthodontist was getting at, was the idea of like, when I'm golfing and I'm stressed over my four-foot putt, you know, that I might lose my match, I'm putting my teeth together, I'm grinding my teeth, you know, I'm like stressed out. You can't make your putts that way, believe me. But that's what he was getting at. While you were boxing, you would be like clenching like that, you know. And unfortunately, you would know if you were doing that. And so I would imagine that the the visible areas that you saw on your teeth, as say worn areas or exposed some exposed inner tooth, is functional wear. It goes on without the patient knowing. And it's because you chew, eat, and swallow and thousands of times a day. So having invisalign and lining up your teeth can help that, but it actually doesn't stop it. A lot of people with ideal uh bite alignment who have had braces or have had orthodontics have still grind their teeth. Actually, the most common TMJ patient is a 25-year-old female who had braces and has a beautiful smile and is grinding her teeth and getting headaches and facial pain from just how her teeth function. Just like your teeth function to sand some away, her teeth are functioning to cause TMJ, and it's all from the same problem. And it isn't alignment. You can have perfect alignment and have these problems because friction on the teeth, on the back teeth, is the main cause. And friction is not something you can measure without the T scan. You need the T-scan technology to measure that and um and then to treat it. And when you treat it with this high precision micro-computer guided adjusting, people stop grinding their teeth. People stop sanding their teeth away while they're using them to chew normally and to work to just as what you might be doing. Again, if you were a tooth grinder, you would know. You'd you'd know you were grinding your teeth.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

Wow. Wow. So you've spent decades um in prostodontics. What has changed the most in dentistry over your career and what has stubbornly remained the same?

SPEAKER_01 10:13

Well, it's a great question. What has changed a lot is the advent of computers and the digital workflow, which is a term for making teeth with computer um uh technology. In other words, computer technology designing the teeth and then milling the teeth out of ceramic blocks and computers doing it all like modern-day machining. And that includes implant parts, that includes uh implant restorations. All forms of dental restorations can be made by computers in the machining process and in the capturing process, by like you said, you had scans of your mouth made. Scanning has become a big part of um dentistry. And the T-scan technology is a scanning technology, it's this is the T-scan recording handle. It's a scanning technology of your bite, and you basically bite into the sensor. I know. And you can grind on the sensor, you can chew on the sensor, you can there are specific things we try to record with it, but it scans the friction and the pressures and the forces on your teeth and the timing on your teeth. Whereas other scanners scan your gums and your implants and your the UAD invisalign scanning. So they were scanning your teeth, but not the bite pressures. They were scanning the alignment and trying to figure out the best way to create the alignment. So all of this digital technology has um improved the fabrication of uh dental restorations and improved the the comfort for the patient, specifically the scanning by removing impressions. I don't know if you've ever had an impression made, but it's like a goof in your mouth that sits in a tray. You don't have to have that anymore. You can have the impressions are made by scanning. The second Bhavvy question, what hasn't remained the same, um, is that installing all the fancy dentistry and trying to understand bite problems in the world of the modern era, the carbon paper method is still being used by dentists, and it's essentially dentists guessing at ink and paper that doesn't measure anything about the bite. And it's been proven to be a guessing method, and it's highly dangerous for patients. It doesn't, patients don't realize that they could go to the dentist and have a few crowns made or go through Invisalign like you are, and at the end of it end up with TMJ. Or at the end of getting their crowns installed, they now have a bite problem they didn't have before. And it happens all over the world. It's an extremely common problem, and it's due to the fact that the dentists are guessing at what bite contacts to adjust by looking at ink and paper. And the ink and paper doesn't tell them any kind of pressure mapping or timing or force levels. And all during this time of these four decades that I've been working on the T scan, we found we can adjust the bite with computer guidance with tremendous amounts of precision and accuracy and control over things like TMJ symptoms. And when you get your invisibility done, we can optimize your the way your teeth touch and how they uh chew and make it so that you don't get TMJ, or you don't get sore muscles, or you don't grind your teeth afterwards. And and so the biggest problem in dentistry that's not being addressed by dentistry is that the method of using of doing bite adjusting is is actually it's guessing, and it shouldn't be allowed. It's taught as if it works. You know, there are principles like the simple principles are a big paper mark means there's a lot of force. It's actually not true at all. There's no correlation between ink and force. And that's been proven. So despite it being proven that it doesn't work, it's also been proven that the dentists actually can't choose the right places very well. Uh four different studies involving about a thousand dentists show that the dentists pick the wrong places to adjust 90 to 95% of the time. That's really bad for the public. It's really bad for the public. And the public doesn't know that. And here's an example of how that can play out. So I once was giving a course, and there was this woman who was being treated at the course because she had 28 caps made three years beforehand. And in those three years, she lived in agony with her bite. And she went back to the dentist many, many times who made the beautiful caps. But it didn't matter how beautiful they were, she was crying, she was unhappy, she couldn't bite down. And this was from the beginning, right? So now I'm seeing her three years into it. And um and she was crying in the chair, speaking Brazilian, uh Portuguese, I apologize, because we were in Brazil. And and the dentist was translating for me what had happened. And essentially, she people kept adjusting her bite with paper and ink, trying to fix what they couldn't see, right? So we made one T-scording, the first one, and it showed there were two huge pressures on her last tooth on the upper left side. Huge pressures, and they were actually in the way of her bite. They would happen. This is the beauty of the T scan, it shows you timing. So she would make these huge pressures before the rest of her teeth could hit. And then before we adjusted those two places, we marked them with paper. Because you have to mark it with T-scan, you only use the paper to mark the teeth. And you don't look at it and say, oh, it's that one because it's big, or it's that one because it's got a hole in it, or you just look the ink is there in the places the T-scrown you need to adjust. And in whatever the ink shape is, you adjust those places the T-scan shows you, right? So we put the paper into this lady's mouth and marked her teeth. There were two very small contacts, really small, on these, in the place where the huge pressures were. And we went in and adjusted only those two places. And she looked up at the dentist who was hosting the course, and she was like, I can bite down, my face doesn't hurt, and that's the first time in three years, and she was crying and hugging this woman who did the work that I guided. I did the T-scan recordings and did the analysis and said, we have to treat those two places. The fascinating part was that the paper marks were so small that all the dentists who saw her in those three years didn't think they meant anything, and they left them there. And so this woman suffered, and this is what I mean. She didn't know, and this is what applies to all the patients that are listening. She didn't know that she was going to go in and have these beautiful 28 caps made, and she was going to come out with a three-year bite problem where she couldn't chew, she couldn't bite, her head was hurting every day, and no one could help her. Right? And that's because the dentists were guessing at the ink and paper. It's a terrible method. It's dangerous for the public. And the and and the and the dental powers to be don't want to stop teaching it because, well, I don't know why, but the T-scan technology offers an amazing alternative. And as this story that I just told you typifies, it took two adjustments all of maybe five minutes. So let's say that the dentist who made all those caps, she came back to him the day afterwards and said, Dr. Expert, with my caps, I can't bite on these teeth. Can you help me? If he had a T scan, he would have taken it out and he would have seen what I saw. And he would have found those places one day after he made the problem because the dentist who installed the case created the problem, right? Then he could correct it. And then this woman wouldn't suffer for three years. And it just shows you the power of measuring the bite pressures. It can't be done without anything except a T-scan.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

Right. So what did you first think when you encountered um computerized byte analysis? Um were you convinced immediately or were you skeptical at first?

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Well, at first I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know how it would work. And although it was made in a way very much like this, in a way very much like this, you bid on a sensor, an electronic wafer that was made of out of different materials than this one. This is T-scan 10 sensor and T-scan 10 recording handle. It had to be figured out how to use it to do things like put in a crown case of 28 teeth or how to analyze someone's bite who has TMJ. Those things had to be figured out. What did the data mean? So I was caught between trying to understand if it was certainly helpful, but also understanding that it had to be figured out. Once I began to figure it out within, let's say, the first four to five months of experimenting with it and trying to work with it in patients' mouths and understand what the data meant and how to work with the data. I immediately that after I had some success with it, I realized it was tremendously better than the paper method. And I only used the paper to mark the teeth. And no one else was willing to do that. Everybody else was teaching that the paper marks mean something, and the paper marks are right, and the paper marks are correct. And the dental community resisted the T scan and it still resists the T scan 42 years later. Dentistry doesn't want to face that the paper mark method is really dangerous for the public and that the dentists are guessing.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

But why is that? Is it some lobbyist in charge of making sure that never happens? Or is it the companies that manufacture? I don't even know how that works. Is it big pharma or whatever the equivalent is in dentistry?

SPEAKER_01 19:59

It's actually none of those things. It's academic resistance to change. It's people who make policy when they're believed to be right, and the field follows their recommendations because they are believed to be right. And they're all completely wrong. This one problem pervades every dental school worldwide, meaning dental schools are still teaching the dentist to guess as if it works, as if it's a good thing when it isn't a good thing at all. And there's an alternative that's a dramatically better and proven technology. The sensors are so powerful. So this sensor, the first tech scan sensor was a dental sensor made in 1984. These sensors now today they're used in aerospace, robotics. Your brake pads are machined with sensors like this before they leave the automobile factory. Your windshield wipers are fit to your windshield using these. They're used in orthopedics, they're used in horse racing, they're used in all kinds of machining and anywhere parts rubbed together and mate and mill and mesh, that's where they're used worldwide. Because they control forces and pressure and allow for corrections to be made that stop damage. For example, your brake pads will last longer if they're machined with a T-scan sensor than if they're just put together and not tested and not run over sensors. And this is something that dentistry doesn't grasp. Instead of adopting this amazing advance, the average expert would say, no, the T-scan doesn't work. It's this the sensor doesn't work, and you know, you know, we just keep using the paper and ink. And this resistance is academic, meaning it's people making policy in writing journal papers or not publishing journal papers that show how good the T scan is. They'll they reject the paper and come up with reasons that they don't want to publish it. That's been going on for 42 years. And it's institutional. For example, there's an inst there's a dental school in in um the Netherlands that won't allow someone to come in and demonstrate the T-scan because they're afraid, they're incorrectly afraid, they're afraid that when someone bites on the sensor, the person is going to get an electric shock. 42 years of me working with the T-scan in all forms, T-scan 1 all the way up to T-scan 10, thousands and thousands of recordings. Not one person ever got a shock from biting into one of these. Zero percent of the people, okay? But this school does not want to face that there's a better way. And for some reason, dentistry doesn't want to face there's a better way. And a lot of academic leaders have resisted this technology. I've had audiences with some of the most famous people in dentistry in the world. And even though I fixed their bite problem in front of them with a patient I've never seen, like this woman in Brazil, right? This woman in Brazil, three years, she couldn't get help from any of these so-called experts in Brazil, people still resist the value of measuring the bite. And if I had the answer, I could answer the question better for you, but I don't understand it.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

Well, thank you. Thank you for breaking it out that way. Um I was going to ask so, how can bite imbalance, how can it show up in someone's daily life beyond the mouth itself?

SPEAKER_01 23:38

Well, that's a very good question. So a very common example is unilateral hearing loss. So that's where over time you start to lose hearing in one ear. And um usually that's progressing over time, like many years. And the the bite imbalance has been studied in those patients to be on the side where the hearing loss occurs. So, in other words, instead of the bite being 50% right and 50% left, someone who might be losing hearing in one ear would have a bite imbalance that's 75% on that side and only 25% on the other side. And so there's a severe imbalance and it overfunctions again. The neurology of swallowing, if you um understand swallowing mechanism in any, not in any detail, but as a regular person, when you you're on the airplane and you want to clear your ears, you swallow, right? So what happens, the bite imbalance hyperfunctions the muscles that control the eardrum, and then the eardrum stops being able to be uncovered by sound. It stays covered, and the hearing goes away because the eardrum can't pull the curtain back, essentially, and the curtain over the eardrum always stays there. And that's it, that's a typical daily example. Another example would be where there are headaches that they keep getting headaches, and the doctor says, you know, we take an MRI and your head is clear, you don't have any tumors, you don't have any, you don't have any cysts, you don't have a brain problem, yet you're still getting headaches around your eyes, and so you take medication, which doesn't stop the headache, you get Botox, which stops the headache for a little while, but it comes back. That's because the teeth are being used thousands of times a day and tightening those muscles up, and nothing that's done externally can control it. It can only be controlled at the bite surface to control that neurology of swallowing. See, swallowing is so important to us, and we do it unconsciously, so we don't feel our teeth. We don't feel the muscles unless they hurt us. And what swallowing actually does for us is it allows us to move food down into our stomach and not into our lungs where we would choke and die. So there's all these muscles involved with making sure when we swallow, food goes down into our stomach, and the teeth talk to all of those muscles and four cranial nerves that control the areas involved in swallowing. So the pharyngeal muscles, which are the neck, the upper neck and middle neck muscles, the nasal pharyngeal muscles, the oral pharyngeal muscles, the jaw muscles, the eye muscles, all of them, facial muscles, are involved in some aspect of swallowing, the ear muscles, and um this is what the T-scan control. So those are the kinds of things that a that a patient would experience headaches, jaw pain, they might have a posture problem, they might have forward head posture or a cant to one side because of a bite imbalance. So there's a lot of things, and um and many of them are treatable by treating the bite directly. It's fascinating in that way.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

Wow. It's the human body is so fascinating because everything is connected to everything else. And it's conversations like this that even open my eyes to see, well, in your mouth, in your face, what your teeth are doing determines what's going on with your posture, the way your head is, when you're walking, when you're sitting, and then that of course links to so many other things. Uh and people that develop back pain later in life, uh, but it all started with the way they were biting when they were 12 years old. And you don't necessarily link those two together. So it's just uh just fascinating to learn all these things. What kinds of patients can benefit most from this computerized bite analysis technology?

SPEAKER_01 27:42

Well, in general terms, all patients would benefit from it. If dentists were using it routinely, there would be much more accurate byte diagnosis being made. Many more bite problems could be treated rapidly and effectively as they are with the technology now. People would be living without night guards, like you have to wear a night guard to sleep with people who have the T scan used on their teeth correctly, it has to be used correctly, and dentists need training in it. They don't need night guards, they don't grind their teeth. People stop clenching their teeth when their bite is corrected. So there there are major changes would go on. So that's the first thing. If dentistry adopted it, many benefits would come to the patients, and um many things would be changed in terms of like what was possible.

SPEAKER_00 28:29

Is there an age limit or a minimum age where you need to take maybe your children to go get checked with the T-scan or up until you are 18 years old or thereabouts? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 28:44

Well, in a way, any age that can bite down, you know, children with uh even um uh primary dentition can be recorded. But the value is in determining whether you should do certain things, such as would it help to do orthodontics because the teeth that are there are lined up so poorly and the forces are so bad. It would help with middle-aged people who have dentistry done, many years of dentistry that's wearing out or falling apart because of too much bite force. It would help with people going through invisalign, young people getting out of braces. So there is no age. See, what the T scan really does is allows you to study what's there and then optimize it in a number of different ways. That many times it's just adjusting the teeth, but other times it can be doing braces to improve forces, and uh, other times it can be adding to the teeth to make a bite balance better rather than taking away from the teeth. So there's a lot of um um potential to improve the physiology of the patient dentally by using the T scan. And so there is no age that I mean, other than maybe the the youngest children, uh, many people would benefit, especially the the people who have a full complement of teeth. So that's age 15 to age you know 95 if you still have your teeth.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

Right, right. So um as far as community health and public health, um, this technology seems to be able to reach certain communities that are underserved. So what might this mean for communities that already face barriers to access healthcare? Because is this still going to mean, okay, well, only if you can afford all your healthcare, um, health insurance can afford certain things, that's when you get access to these fancy machines, or is there something in place for that sort of um engagement?

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Well, it's a very good question. I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer because I'm not really involved in public health, uh, other than helping the public, but um not in an organized way, like with community health centers and and um community hospitals that aren't, let's say, funded by universities or privately funded institutions. This technology, specifically, I would say it would help any community that it's part of because it helps with bite problems. And bite problems are anyone who has teeth is potentially susceptible to a bite problem. So there are a lot of potential patients that would benefit. But in terms of it it making a difference in a in a community setting, it's only if there's access to it. And that would be, let's say, if the state provided a T scan to every you know, dental clinic, you know, across the Commonwealth of like you're in Florida, in Florida, or if they did it regionally. But in its own, as its own entity, no, it would not have uh community uh benefits unless there was access to it. But it's not the kind of thing that um they would find it at a university in the current arena. Uh and so university health centers that might be community-based would probably be the places you could find.

SPEAKER_00 32:07

Got it, got it. Sounds good. So um where do you think um bio-analysis and digital dentistry are headed over the next five to ten years? Do you see a pattern, a trend, and so on?

SPEAKER_01 32:24

Well, I certainly see the trend of going towards digital technologies being bettered and improved in their accuracy and trueness and the digital workflow, maybe not expanding in terms of like what's done, but expanding in terms of uh help from AI, better machining technology, better scanning technology from the standpoint of like the Invisalign scanners that you had, better radiographic machines, and of course better milling and production design um machinery. The most important advance would be if the T-sc was adopted instead of being sort of a nice thing that some dentists have. Dentistry really needs to adopt it for the greater good of the health of the public and for the survivability of these fancy dental restorations. They're all very brittle. The new materials are all very brittle, and they there's a lot of complications. It's another thing, sort of a, you know, a black mark on dentistry, is that implants, there's huge numbers of breakage and complication rates, fractures of parts. Uh uh it's been shown actually in in the literature that complications with implants are far exceed those of conventional dentistry, fillings and crowns done on teeth versus crowns and bridges made on implants, things like that. So the major, there's a major need for uh patient well-being, number one, to eliminate this guessing method. There's a major need for the fancy machining process that's now taken over how dentistry is done, that case finishing, end product outcome control over bite problems is a huge arena that we already published a study that showed, interestingly enough, because we were just talking about complications. We published a study that showed that the complication rate on about 150 implants without the T scan, just being put in by the paper and guessing method, was 25%. So one in every four implant uh case had some kind of a complication: chipping, screw loosening, cracking, breaking, prostheses coming loose from the teeth, things like that. When the same 150 unit uh number was used T-scan with the carbon paper to just mark the teeth, but to use the T scan to find the problem contacts, the complication rate dropped to 1.8%. 25%, one in four, to less than two in a hundred. So the digital workflow needs the T-screen at the end for the patients to maintain their implants, to not have as many broken parts, and to not develop TMJ afterwards, Invisalign, for example, that's a very common thing. People get Invisalign, then they get TMJ. You can only fix that with the T-scan. So the future needs the T-scology to be adopted by the profession. And of course, I'm very hopeful of that. I've been trying for 42 years to have the T-scan be adopted by the profession despite all the um resistance that's developed from the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 35:43

Right, right. So for listeners who may be dealing with some chronic jaw tension or headaches or even generally unexplainable dental discomfort, what are some questions they should ask their dentist or their orthodontist during their next visit?

SPEAKER_01 36:03

Do you have a T scan to measure my bite? And when they say no, they don't have a T-scor or the T-scon't work, the patients would say to that dentist, Well, I have these bite problems you haven't been able to fix. I'm gonna go find a dentist who has a T-scan and knows how to use it. And that would be the best thing they could do. Because dentists who don't have a T-scan and don't know they need a T-scre aren't gonna be able to help with those nagging chronic bite issues that you know night guards don't fix and Botox doesn't fix. And, you know, what's fascinating is all the things that uh chronic bite problems that we try to fix in dentistry with all these external methods that don't address the neurology can't fix them. And so they just perpetuate, and the person lives with them slowly getting worse. So an example would be if I have headaches once a week when I'm 20, by the time I'm 30, I probably have five headaches a week. And by the time I'm 40, I have headaches every day. If there's no intervention to the bite. And that's what we see with these patients. And that intervention is not making night guards and taking Botox. That doesn't stop the headaches. That just acts like it stops them for a little while, but doesn't control them. The person can't has to do those things. They have to get the Botox, they have to wear their nightguard, they have to take the medication. With T-scan computer guided high precision microadjusting, the person doesn't use a night guard, doesn't get the headaches, doesn't grind their teeth, doesn't destroy their implant case, all of it is hugely beneficial. So the question they need to ask is, do you have one? And if the dentist says, No, I don't have one, or I heard it doesn't work, or you know, I use the byte paper and that's adequate, then that person should find a dentist who has a T-scan. The company uh website um doesn't list dentists, but it has the phone number. Uh www.techscan.com slash dental is the website. And they can direct you to trained experts. There is also a few other websites with trained experts. That's the other thing. If they find someone who has a T-scan and they say, Yes, I do have a T-scan, have you been trained? Is the next question. Has an expert been to your office and taught you how to use it? And if they say, No, I took a few courses and learned on my own, they don't know what they're doing with it. The only way you can be effective with the T-scan is to have in-office training with patients that you learn from an expert who teaches you chair side how to use it and what the data means and how to use the data to make intelligent decisions about treating the bike. And um, that's a really important thing. Owning a T-scan doesn't make someone a user at all. And training is essential. Wow. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 38:56

And all of this basically boils down to the fact that we need to treat the root cause of a problem. Pun intended, by the way. Yes, without just uh not just treat the symptoms. So whatever is causing a headache, because uh what headache is one of the things I used to like to use as an example that has so many things that can cause it. If you're dehydrated, you could have a headache. If you banged your head against the wall, you get a headache. If your bite is misaligned, you get a headache.

SPEAKER_01 39:30

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 39:30

Wow, wow.

SPEAKER_01 39:32

Well, the thing is the bite aspect, the bite doesn't have to be misaligned. It can be beautifully aligned and cause a headache because it has too much friction from the back teeth in it, which I talked about a little earlier. So alignment, it's it's a little bit misunderstood that alignment being good solves problems. It makes it possible, the uh I should say, the better the alignment, the simpler it is to treat the problems at the tooth level. But the alignment alone doesn't solve the problems. That's why there was a recent paper, it's very interesting, there was a recent paper that was published about whether having orthodontics as a treatment treats TMJ successfully. And orthodontics, as you know, being an aligner person, is designed to align you ideally, right? So the study looked at whether the literature shows that yes, if you go through orthodontics, whether it be aligner orthodontics or braces orthodontics, will it treat your TMJ problems? And the answer is no. It's not statistically effective. Tooth movement alone can't make the bite operate ideally because despite the ideal alignment, the friction in the back teeth, that's measurable again, only with the T-scan, is the main problem that activates the nerve endings that stimulate the central nervous system. So by treating the friction, you can turn off that neurology. Alignment can't turn off that neurology. And it often stimulates that neurology because it's less than ideal. So that's why I said the better the alignment, the easier it is to treat. But alignment alone will not solve a lot of problems for patients. It's not precise enough.

SPEAKER_00 41:17

Got it. Got it. So at this stage of your career, um what continues to drive your mission to educate both patients and your fellow practitioners?

SPEAKER_01 41:30

Well, the the it's the same mission I've had for 42 years is that this is a much better way for dentists to practice uh occlusion, the science of the bite. It's a much better way for them to treat problems in their office they can't treat in any other way. And it's a much better way for patients to be safely treated and have their bite accurately diagnosed. So my mission is to drive adoption. And the public really deserves to have this proven treatment. It's not that I made it up yesterday and there's only a few studies. There are hundreds of studies that show how powerful it is. There are hundreds of studies that show how effective it is. And instead of dentistry adopting that scientific basis, they just sort of, you know, don't really want to register that it's important in favor of a method that involves guessing at the ink and paper, and the dentists are hurting the public, right? So my mission is the same: improve dental care by better bite management, which can only be done with computerized bite analysis. It can't be done with traditional methods. And the T-scan is a proven technology now. We're on to T-scan 10, and we have you know proven many, many things that traditional inclusion has no answers for.

SPEAKER_00 42:50

Wow, this has been a really insightful conversation. And of course, for me personally, as someone who is going through an alignment process over the past two years, I've learned so much from you and definitely have some questions from my orthodontist and my dentist the next time I go see them. So thank you so much for that. Um, is there anything else you would want to talk about that we haven't covered so far?

SPEAKER_01 43:18

Well, I do want to say that your orthodontist is probably going to align your teeth better than they were, and that's a good thing. It doesn't mean the end product will be as optimal as it could be, and that's what the T scan would show you. And then it would be up to the patient you to decide if you wanted to refine it to where it was optimal. And I think that would be a function of whether you had symptoms after you had uh invisalign, for example, jaw tension or headaches, whether you had um or whether you had total comfort, right? And your teeth were operating pretty well, right? So in your case, stopping the wear and the frictional damage, right, that's where the T scan could help you after Invisalign. So I I just wanted to make that point clear. And uh just restate your question once more. Is there anything else I would like to add? Was that the question?

SPEAKER_00 44:08

Yeah, yeah. Or anything you would like to talk about that we haven't talked about so far.

SPEAKER_01 44:12

Well, about you. What is it that you other than being a podcaster?

SPEAKER_00 44:17

Right. So um by by way of background, um I like to say I do research and investigations within cybersecurity. So by training, I came, I studied electrical engineering in school in Nigeria, and then I came here for my master's and PhD also in electrical engineering. And I realized I like um research and investigation. So one thing led to the other. I was supposed to become a professor of electrical engineering, but since I didn't like teaching, I decided, okay, let me explore this research and investigation. So my mentors back then, who I'm still in touch with now, they were like, okay, why not look into this IT security field or IT security, cybersecurity, and see what you can make of it. Because electrical engineering background exposes you to a lot of computer science and computer engineering. So I already took a bunch of classes that computer science students took. So it wasn't too much of a foreign field for me to pivot into. So I want to say I successfully pivoted into cybersecurity from an academic background, electrical engineering, computer science, and so on. So one thing led to the other. I started picking and choosing the research and investigation components of cybersecurity. So threat intelligence, figuring out what attackers are up to before or during the attacks. If an attack was successful, going back to see, okay, why was it successful? How can we prevent it next time? If an attack was not successful, okay, how can we be more successful next time? And one thing led to the other, I worked for companies who were, you know, prioritizing cybersecurity. I worked on companies where you would conduct offensive cybersecurity, basically going after the bad guys to stop them from coming at you. I was able to do some research that was adjacent to military type people and intelligent community type people. I was able to work on fraud investigations for a financial industry company. And so basically, I've worked in different institutions here and there. Um currently I'm in the financial industry working on insider threat cases, employees trying to do bad things against the organization. Maybe someone is recruiting them from outside, or maybe they themselves are the ones just doing the bad things because they maybe uh they have a gambling problem and they have need for some quick money. So they do some questionable things to make fast money by selling company secrets. Or someone who knows they have problems approaches them from outside and says, Well, you could give us this sensitive information and we pay you. And everything in between, just someone attacking a fellow employee for something they said online, and so on, and so on. So basically, research and investigations, and along the line, I realized I like to share what I know with other people, which is how this podcast started. So having conversations with people, and I learned by talking to people. I'm a very curious person. I want to learn if I see you are doing something interesting, I want to learn how you are doing it. Not because I want to copy you, no, but because there are things I can learn from you that would make me do what I do better. And that concept, I picked it up from my grandpa when he was still alive. And I would listen to him tell stories from when he was much younger, and I started realizing, well, human beings are just, you know, we just copy each other. But only if you pay attention and you stay curious to copy other people. And then, of course, don't copy the bad things they do, just copy the good things, leave the bad things outside. So that's the summary of who I am, what I do, and so on.

SPEAKER_01 48:40

Do you work for a single company or are you independent that you get hired to do these individual projects?

SPEAKER_00 48:47

Every once in a while I consult in a volunteer capacity for mostly law enforcement agencies. So, like I keep mentioning research and investigations, my skill set is basically involves finding information that could help solve a case, that could help find a missing person, that could help someone who is a victim of domestic violence escape their situation, or even yeah. So basically, law enforcement agencies trying to solve a crime, they put on their website and they go, Well, we're looking for this person, whoever has a tip, send it in. Or different things regarding cybersecurity. If a coffee shop keeps getting hacked online and someone knows I could help them, and then they reach out to me saying, Oh, well, what could we do? And I'm like, Okay, first of all, what kind of password are you using to secure your transaction server where everybody's card is being swiped? Well, maybe don't use Summer 2026 as your password. You know, things like that. So yeah. And I typically work for companies, but then I volunteer every now and then. I speak at conferences. I what else do I do? Seems like I do so many things.

SPEAKER_01 50:15

Oh, that's good. That's good. It sounds like you have your hands in a lot of important um, you know, cyber issues. And of course, most of us aren't that savvy, and it doesn't take much to have your computer hacked. And we're not we're not no one's really coming after us, but certainly banking institutions, financial institutions, defense contractors, right? Uh gun manufacturers, weapons manufacturers. Yeah, I'm sure it's huge. It's got to be huge.

SPEAKER_00 50:43

So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the question. So I I hardly get these types of, you know.

SPEAKER_01 50:52

Well, I'm glad uh obviously uh it's nice to know what you do as well. You are the host of this podcast. Thanks for having me. So it's a it's an interesting offshoot from you know your line of work.

SPEAKER_00 51:04

Yep, yep. So this has been a fun conversation, and of course, I would very much like to, you know, have another conversation with you um down the line to see maybe they come up with TSCAN 10, 12, 15, and so on.

SPEAKER_01 51:21

Well, I think there'll be more iterations, but the the main problem, it always has worked, even in its infancy, better than what we're doing in dentistry. So the adoption, regardless of the version, is much more important than a new version. A new version won't drive adoption. Adoption is is something that's political and academic and has been greatly interfered with by the um powers that have chosen not to acknowledge the need for much better bite care for the for the well-being of the public. So thank you for giving me a chance to to to talk about it with you. And I'd be happy to come back and tell you that T scan 15 had been adopted by everyone in the world. That would be a great thing.

SPEAKER_00 52:07

So nice, nice. And this is not gonna be a complete um episode recording if we don't give a shout out to um Mr. Derek, who is listening quietly in the background. Um, thank you for putting this together.

SPEAKER_01 52:22

Yes, of course. Thank you to Derek and Interdependent PR. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 52:27

Thank you so much. Talk to you soon.

SPEAKER_01 52:29

Bye. Yes.