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PrintTop Dentists 2009
Technical expertise and fine clinical care define our state’s top specialists. Under their treatment, getting your teeth straightened, cleaned or replaced is easier than ever. Following, profiles on some of our best.
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Orthodontics
Ali Husain
Orthodontist Ali Husain is on the fast track. Thanks to state-of-the-art technology, he can straighten teeth faster and more precisely than ever before. His Middletown office, decked in NASCAR regalia, reflects his patients’ need for speed.
Husain, who also has an office in Newark, uses a new system called SureSmile, developed by a company based in Texas. Using a sort of high-speed digital camera, a SureSmile scanner captures thousands of images of a patient’s bite to create a complete 3-D image. From there, the company’s advanced treatment planning software creates a strategy for the movement of every tooth. After that, a SureSmile robot bends memory wire to meet the specifications of the plan. The company then ships it back to the orthodontist and a waiting set of teeth, which straighten in about 40 percent less time than with traditional methods. Only about 200 clinics in the world own the technology.
“It’s the most accurate scanner in the world,” Husain says. “To me this stuff is amazing.”
A bride-to-be went to Husain last year, pleading for straight teeth for her nuptials, which were less than a year away. Husain and SureSmile were able to deliver the goods, “with the quality I wanted,” he says.
Things tend to move pretty quickly around Husain’s office. His dental instruments are kept in a storage container that resembles a NASCAR pit crew toolbox. Hygienists wear the number of their favorite driver on their uniforms, racecar shells hang from the ceiling and the clinic waiting room is filled with bleachers.
Racing fans get a kick out of his decor, but SureSmile, along with improved memory wires and wire-free systems such as Invisalign, have attracted a new breed of adult patients to Husain’s office. About 20 percent of his patients are adults seeking a fast and easy solution to crooked teeth, without cumbersome braces.
“Orthodontics really has come a long way since the railroad track version of braces I grew up with,” he says.
Husain is a member of the American Association of Orthodontists, the American Board of Orthodontists, the Middle Atlantic Society of Orthodontists and the Greater Philadelphia Society of Orthodontics and the Delaware State Dental Society. He also teaches as a clinical professor at Temple University School of Dentistry.
“I try to give my students clinical pearls on how to handle the business side, as well as patient relations,” he says. “The most important thing is talking directly to the patient. Sometimes an orthodontist will talk to a parent like the child doesn’t exist.”
Kids are thinking people, too, Husain says. “Orthodontics is often one of the first things in their lives where they have to be responsible,” he says. “So if we don’t relate to them or make them get it, we’re not going to succeed.”
Page 2: Pediatric Dentistry | Rachel Maher
