06/16/2026
I’m not sure how, or why, the idea of capturing a bite in “centric relation” (CR) became such a hurdle to dentists, especially younger ones. Hurdle may actually be putting it lightly. For the first 10 years of my career I was straight up afraid of this concept.
Afraid I couldn’t accurately capture it
Afraid if I couldn’t capture it that my dentistry would fail
Afraid I’d be stuck doing single-tooth dentistry my whole career without mastering this concept
To make matters worse, did you know that there are more 20 different definitions in dentistry of what “centric relation” is??? No wonder we’re lost!
And when do we need to record this location? What are we wanting to accomplish for the patient when we are determining the patients centric relation, or fully seated condylar position, or most anterior-superior condylar position, or muscle-neutral bite position (which is what I refer to it as)🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️ ??? It’s when we’re re-establishing a patients bite, right? Maybe the patient has blown through their occlusion due to bruxism. Maybe the enamel is gone due to chemical erosion. Or maybe the patient has lost teeth and we’re replacing the bite with implants or dentures. We want a stable and repeatable bite position to build occlusion towards.
The point is, I don’t want you to overthink when you need to acquire your CR bite. And when you do need to capture it, let the patients muscles help guide you in to the correct position. This is the concept of deprogramming a patient.
We eliminate inflammation
We eliminate habitual bite posturing
We let the elevator muscles do their job and seat the condyles
There are several anterior-only devices that work well for this. I use a Kois Deprogrammer b/c it’s easy to design and print, patients tolerate wearing it well, and I can have the patient while I’m capturing the deprogrammed bite (which is not the case for devises like quick splints).
2 weeks of nighttime where and you can finally trust your bite record.
