Flexible Dental Handpiece Design: Breaking the Rules to Reach the Unreachable

Objectives: Every patient presents with a different set of challenges to the dentist when it comes to caries removal. Be it a patient with limited mouth opening or patient with childhood or adult form of rampant caries, complete caries excavation may be a challenge to achieve for the dentist. Similarly there are some tricky areas in the mouth like the disto-lingual aspect of the upper third molars, distal proximal areas below the contact in all the molars etc. which are difficult to access for excavation of caries. In the course of evolution, the hand instruments used in conservative dentistry as well as in other specialities, have been modified from straight to various contra-angled designs which have proved to show a great improvement in increasing the accessibility and convenience to reach the difficult areas in patient’s mouth. Whereas the evolution of the rotary devices in terms of contra-angulation have been minimal. The present study addresses the solution to the very problem.
Methods: The present invention describes a semi-rigid hand piece design with flexible head to overcome the above mentioned problems with modified internal machineries to comply with the commonly used dental chair and to work with the same basic principle as that of conventional dental air rotor.
Results: The flexible head facilitate to provide a dynamic contra-angulation to the handpiece.
Conclusions: Better accessibility can be achieved by contra-angulated handpiece design which may enhance the overall clinical performance.