Chinese dental prostheses: threat or tool? Let's be honest

If you seat prosthetics in France, there is a fair chance you already work — without knowing it — with a laboratory that outsources part of its production abroad. It is an economic reality of the sector, rarely written down. And it deserves better than the two stock responses you hear everywhere: embarrassed silence, or "the Chinese crown" waved around as a sales scarecrow. You run a practice and your liability is engaged at every seating: you have a right to know how this actually works.

Why the fear exists — and where it is justified

Most practitioners have lived through a badly imported prosthesis at least once. The crown arrives, the contact point is open, the margin approximate or the occlusion impossible to balance properly — and you are the one compensating chairside, adjusting a piece whose exact alloy and manufacturing conditions you do not know, while the patient waits with their mouth open. Add the real lead times that never match the quoted ones, the impossibility of talking to the technician who actually made the piece, and the awkward question the day a patient or an inspection asks where the medical device you seated came from. All of this is true. But it describes badly done importing — not importing itself.

What the 100% Santé reform changed for laboratories

Since the reform, a significant share of prosthetic procedures in France is price-capped. For a laboratory paying French technicians, premises and payroll charges, several capped procedures are structurally loss-making: every piece produced loses money. That is not a management problem — the numbers simply do not add up: the dominant cost of a French-made prosthesis is skilled labour, and it does not fit under the cap.

Laboratories responded in three ways. Some refuse capped work, and push the problem onto you. Others accept it and compensate in silence — often by outsourcing abroad without saying so, sometimes by cutting the time spent on each piece, including the ones outside the capped basket. The last group organises production and says so. We are in the third group.

How our dual model works, concretely

Our laboratory in Déols (Châteauroux, central France) handles aesthetics, complex cases, difficult shades and urgent remakes — everything that benefits from proximity and direct dialogue with the technician, delivered in one week door to door. For simple prosthetics and capped procedures, we work with an international partner we selected after visiting and comparing their workshops on site, at their place — not from a catalogue.

What makes this model defensible is not intent, it is the safeguards. Every piece, whatever its production route, passes quality control in Déols before it ships to you. Every order comes with its declaration of conformity, origin and materials included. You approve the 3D design, then photos of the finished work, before shipping. And the route is displayed at ordering time, with its price and lead time: you choose piece by piece, patient by patient. A demanding anterior crown made in Déols, a capped partial denture from the partner — you make the call, not us.

The real dividing line

It does not run between French and foreign laboratories. It runs between laboratories that tell you where your pieces come from and those that do not. A local workshop can perfectly well deliver outsourced pieces without any checks; an audited foreign route, controlled in France and documented, can give you more guarantees. What we defend is a system where you never have to guess. We manufacture in Déols, we check everything in Déols, and the origin of every piece is written on the declaration that travels with it.