everyone here is acting like a bunch of hysterical women. one crown has been “reported” to have contained lead amongst millions placed every year. i’m a dental lab tech and have been making crowns for twelve years and i’m very skeptical regarding this accusation. first of all getting porcelain to bond to metal is very tricky. you can’t just throw in some lead and expect everything to bond as usual. you have to work within certain coefficients of expansion for both porcelain and alloy to be able to bond . second there is only a couple of manufactures of porcelain in the entire world. from these few manufactures come all of the porcelains used worldwide. these porcelains will only fuse to certain formulated alloys. for example the porcelain i currently use must be applied to an alloy that has a coefficient of expansion between 14.2 - 14.9. lead just doesn’t just find its way into porcelains or dental alloys, it wouldn’t bond correctly. my belief on all this hysteria is based on the nadl trying to squeeze out small dental labs which account for more than half of all dental restorations made in the US. the nadl is run and backed by large corporate dental labs who are building and buying labs in china, mexico, costa rica, korea, etc. like its going out of style. some companies have formed that act as middlemen for smaller labs allowing them to outsource to foreign countries just like the big labs. other companies have formed domestically that allow small labs to utilize new technology such as zirconia core crowns as mentioned in an earlier post. the nadl is pushing the fda to mandate that all labs who outsource to foreign and domestic labs, for all or part of a crown, must register with the fda, which comes with huge compliance expenses. notice their not trying to stop foreign outsourcing. they’re pushing for this expense because they know most small labs will fold leaving most of the market for the corporate labs who can afford the compliance expenses. once this happens they can start sending their lab work to their company owned foreign labs and make money hand over fist. this may sound far fetched to an outsider but i’m in the industry, i read the journals, i see the advertisements from corp. labs for cheap outsourced crowns, i know who is on the nadl board, many of the ceo and presidents of the larg corp. labs. thankyou for letting me vent.
So me new toothies good r badz?
Glad you vented! Thanks for the info. : )
actually, the ohio lady is suing (that’s one case), the reporter in the story sampled 8 labs in china, and one of those came back with lead also (that’s two cases), then you have at least two other cases that are out there (now four cases) that haven’t gone mainstream. If your a dental lab technician, then you might want to head over to dentaltown and take a look for yourself. You’re spot on when it comes to the NADL, the current president(Joe Gerace) of NADL is/was a partner for the largest privately-owned dental lab corporation (Dental Services Group) in the United States and sends to china regularly.......makes you wonder doesn’t it?