A clinical and cost-benefit evaluation of five facebows.
OBJECTIVE
Although the use of an arbitrary facebow and a full-sized articulator can reduce laboratory errors, many dentists do not use a facebow routinely because the procedure seems to be both intricate and time consuming. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate four earpiece-type facebows and the Snow facebow and to compare the time required for registration, the ease of manipulation, and cost-benefit considerations.


METHODS
Twenty-five dentists who routinely used only the Snow facebow were asked, after a brief explanation, to perform registrations with the Snow facebow and four new-generation, earpiece-type facebows. The time required for each facebow registration was recorded. Dentists were also asked to fill out a questionnaire concerning ease of manipulation and cost-benefit factors.


RESULTS
The Quick facebow was the facebow of choice of most of the dentists because of its favorable design and usage characteristics and cost-benefit ratio. The Artex 3-D facebow proved to be both the easiest and the fastest to manipulate. The Spring-bow and the Whip-Mix Quickmount were next in rank, and the Snow facebow scored the lowest.


CONCLUSIONS
The use of earpiece-type facebows is both simple and fast, and practitioners judged this type of facebow to be superior to the Snow facebow.
Samet
Nachum
N
Department of Prosthodontics, Hadassah-Hebrew University, Faculty of Dental Medicine, Jerusalem, Israel. nsamet@yahoo.com
Smidt
Ami
A
Samet
Naama
N
Weiss
Ervin Izhak
EI
D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D003725:Dental Articulators / Q000191:economics; D003766:Dental Occlusion; D017267:Dental Prosthesis Design / Q000191:economics; D003815:Dentists; D004867:Equipment Design; D006801:Humans; D007574:Jaw Relation Record / Q000295:instrumentation*; D013997:Time Factors