The Chicago Dental Society Midwinter Meeting is over.

We attended 3 of the 4 days, taking continuing education the first two days then spending all day in the exhibitors' hall on Sunday. They tend to be a little more generous with samples of toothpaste and such on Sunday, if only because they don't want to carry the stuff back to wherever they came from.

We had some good meals with several of my classmates and saw Gary Sinise (yes the CSI/Forrest Gump guy) and the Lt. Dan Band at the Park West on Friday night. It's a really great event when CDS puts it on. The band was good, not great. They're sort of a glorified wedding band with a movie and tv star on stage if not really "fronting" the band. Mr. Sinise is a bass player, which means he's not front and center musically. He doesn't sing much besides a few backup vocals. As a musician, he's solid, but I've known bass players who are a lot better than he is. He has some top notch musical talent in his band. Unfortunately, the vocalists are not among them. Three females and one male switched off on the vocals depending on the tune, and while they were all okay, none of them blew me away. They drag down the band, in my opinion. I don't know if it's all because of them, but the band seems to lack energy and maybe chemistry. Still, they're good musicians, they play flawlessly, and as I said, they'd be a very good wedding band, with their selection of cover tunes. (There may have been one original, but maybe not...I knew everything else they covered.)

I sat in classes for 6 hours on Friday and 6 hours on Saturday. Friday's class was on "cosmetic" restorative dentistry, which is a fancy term for doing tooth colored dentistry. Instead of using amalgam, we now have plastic filling materials available, that offer a lot of positives. The trick is doing them well because they're quite a bit more technique sensitive. (Meaning, if everything doesn't go well, you have higher potential for failure of the filling.) This class gave a lot of info on how to do them better and more predictably.

Saturday's class was on occlusion. That's a fancy word for how your teeth come together. It sounds dull, and it probably is for a lot of dentists. I get a lot out of these lectures, but I recognize that without the background I have (special coursework at the Dawson Institute in St. Petersburg Florida) a lot of the info would go over my head. As it is, I see a lot of cases that this information applies to. IT's the sort of information that can give one a good framework for looking at various patients.

We had dinner with my best friend from dental school on Sunday night, at a cajun restaurant called Heaven On Seven. Very good food.

And now it's back at the old grind. Hope everyone had a good weekend!