The
Smile
Designer
When Dr. Andy Chang established his dental
practice in Richardson in 2003, he wasn’t
looking to bring escaped convicts from Fox River
Penitentiary into his clientele. Five years later,
Dr. Chang now finds himself practicing his stateof-the-art dental procedures on two high-profile
prison escapees.
They’re not real prisoners, of course. They’re
actors Robert Knepper and Dallas native Lane
Garrison who play inmates in Fox’s hot new hit
series, Prison Break, which is filmed in Dallas.
An Interview with Dr. Andy C. Chang
filming an episode of the show’s second season. “I
was in the worst pain of my life. I had a root canal
done. I’ve had three root canals before, but Dr.
Andy’s was by far the easiest. His assistants are the
nicest people in the world, and I was pretty much
in and out very quickly,” Garrison said.
Dr. Chang also made a crown for one of
Garrison’s teeth using a high-tech dental
restoration technology called CEREC, which
is perfect for patients like Garrison who live
busy lives and are always on the go. Because
Garrison travels back and forth from Dallas to
Los Angeles, it’s not always easy to schedule
multiple appointments, much less be there for
those appointments. Dr. Chang was able to handle
Garrison’s root canal and design his crown all in
one visit and without temporaries. The CEREC
One of those happy patients is Garrison. “The
whole process of getting a crown is usually just
tiring. You spend a couple of days at the dentist’s
office, and then there’s scheduling and that whole
thing, but with this process, it was instantaneously
there, which was amazing to me. When Dr. Andy
made the crown, it only took 11 minutes, and the
whole process took maybe a little over an hour,”
he said.
“Dr. Andy has done the most amazing work for
me. And for somebody like me who constantly has
teeth problems, he’s definitely the best,” Garrison
said. “Friends think it looks great. It looks like a
brand new tooth.”
“Dr. Andy has done the most
amazing work for me. And
for somebody like me who
constantly has teeth problems,
he’s definitely the best,”
Lane Garrison Escapes Pain
Garrison, a J.J. Pearce High School graduate,
known to Prison Break fans as fugitive David
“Tweener” Apolskis, recently talked about his
experience with Dr. Chang after wrapping up a day
of filming Shooter, a Mark Wahlberg film currently
in production.
“Usually you dread going to the dentist, but
Dr. Andy makes it easy and quick. He’s definitely
one of the best,” Garrison said. “I told him he’s
going to be the dentist of the stars now. I’m sending
the whole cast of Prison Break over to see him.”
Garrison saw Dr. Chang in September while
the Prison Break cast was in Dallas in the midst of
technology uses computerized images of a patient’s
teeth to create precisely designed, color-matched
and durable all-ceramic crowns, onlays and
veneers. The non-metallic restoration bonds to the
existing tooth or remaining tooth structure for an
extremely durable, natural looking smile.
“With this technology, we are able to help
patients whose lives are busy and don’t have time
to take time off from their busy schedules to travel
back and forth to the dental office,” Dr. Chang
said. “It’s all about time. If we reduce the amount
of time a patient has to spend in the dental office,
which most people don’t enjoy doing, we’re going
to make them happier.”
Robert Knepper Escapes Crown Work
And true to his word, Garrison sent his first
Prison Break cast member to visit Dr. Chang in
September. While shooting a scene in Dallas
recently, Prison Break star Robert Knepper, who
plays the twisted Theodore “T-Bag” Bagwell,
thought he had damaged a crown and called
Garrison to find out the name of his dentist.
“I was doing a scene and I had some wire in my
teeth, and I was trying to pull it out and then all
of a sudden I realized ‘Ow,’ I had a lot of pain.
when your appointment is due. I don’t even have
time to nap on the couch in the waiting room,”
Gurr joked.
“During the visits, they try to make you
as comfortable as possible. It’s a very nice
atmosphere,” she said.
Beautiful Smile for A Beautiful Day
BEFORE BEFORE BEFORE I called my friend, Lane, who knows everybody in
Dallas because he grew up there and asked him for
his dentist friend’s name,” Knepper said during
a telephone interview from LA. “Dr. Andy was
great. I had my dog, and he said ‘Come on over,
bring the dog, it’s OK.’ He was great. He was really
reassuring, took an X-ray, and the problem was
that it was a crown that I was pulling on. Dr. Andy
looked at it and said don’t worry about it.
You’re fine.”
What was memorable to Knepper, he said,
was not the actual dental examination itself,
but the total sense of peace and trust
theexperience brought him. The compassion and
skill of Dr. Chang and the warmth and kindness
his office staff showed him brought Knepper, the
son of a veterinarian, back to his idyllic days as a
child growing up in small-town Ohio when times
were simpler.
“It was like growing up in Ohio again. It was a
small town kind of feeling. Everyone in his office
is so personable,” Knepper said. “Some of his
office staff knew the show, some of them didn’t,
but it didn’t matter. They were very warm, very
open, and it was exactly the kind of feeling you
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INFORM
OCTOBER 2006
AFTER
AFTER
AFTER
want when you’re going in there going ‘Uh oh,
am I going to have to have a new crown because of
something stupid I did?’”
Dr. Chang told Knepper his tooth would be a
little sore, but the crown is in good condition and
needs no repair.
You Don’t Have to Be a Star
Dr. Chang provides just the right mix of
reconstructive, restorative and aesthetic dental
procedures for his patients. Named in the
November 2004 issue of Texas Monthly magazine
as one of the state’s Top 50 cosmetic “Super
Dentists” based on a survey of 2,000 of his peers,
Dr. Chang specializes in more complicated cases,
such as full mouth restoration, to conventional
preventive dentistry such as fillings, crowns,
bridges and root canals. His clientele ranges from
the young to the old, engineers to electricians and
stars to students… like Julie Hines.
Beautiful Smile for A Beautiful Day
The first thing Julie Hines noticed in every
picture ever taken of her was her teeth and how
yellow and off-centered they appeared. The 23-
year-old hospitality management major at the
University of North Texas decided she wanted to
make her smile perfect for two huge upcoming
events in her life: her graduation and wedding,
both taking place in December 2006.
“No one else really noticed how my teeth looked
in pictures, but it really bothered me. Every single
picture, I looked at and thought ‘Are those really
my teeth? Are they really not the same size and are
they really that yellow?’ I’m getting married in four
months, and I’m about to graduate from college,
and I thought there are going to be so many
pictures. I didn’t want my teeth to look like that,”
Hines said.
Hines described her childhood teeth as
“crooked with big buck teeth and a big gap.” She
had quite a bit of dental work done to correct the
problems when she was in high school, including
braces, retainers and various other procedures such
as porcelain veneers, but the veneers were not as
white nor as natural looking as she wanted them
to be.
“When I got the veneers put on, they matched
them to my teeth, and my teeth happened to be
yellow. I didn’t want them like that permanently
because I didn’t like the way it looked,” Hines said.
Hines took her dental concerns to Dr. Chang,
who came up with a plan to help design the perfect
smile for her upcoming big day. First, Dr. Chang
used ZOOM! Laser Teeth Whitening on Hines’
teeth to get them as white as possible before he
performed any other work. ZOOM!, an in-office
whitening process using light-activated hydrogen
peroxide gel, whitens discolored enamel and
dentin an average of six to 10 shades in about a
half-hour.
Many of his patients have Dr. Chang perform
ZOOM!, which is featured on the hit ABC TV
show Extreme Makeover, prior to any cosmetic
dentistry to obtain the best possible cosmetic
outcome.
After the whitening procedure, however, Hines
said when Dr. Chang took off the old veneers
she’d had since high school, he noticed that one of
the teeth was cracked, which led to an emergency
root canal. “It was so unexpected, but he did such
a great job and it was fine afterward,” she said.
Her tooth was too small for the tool dentists
usually use to perform a root canal, so Dr. Chang
had to perform a manual root canal that he
learned in dentistry school but had not had to use
in years.
“My tooth, he said, was the size or a
preschooler’s tooth, so they didn’t have any
equipment small enough to do a normal root
Comfort is Calming
Left to right: Fannie Turner - Hygiene Coordinator, Nicole Trenchard - Dental Hygienist, Stephanie
Perdue - Appointment Coordinator, Jenny Chang - Insurance Coordinator, Jennie Luong - Dental
Administrator, Angelica Lozano - Dental Assistant, Lori Dillehay - Dental Hygienist (not pictured)
canal,” Hines said. “So he had to do it an old way
that he learned when he was in school. It ended up
being so much more work than we thought it was
going to be.”
Dr. Chang made a new set of crowns for Hines’
front four teeth, and on Sept. 15, Dr. Chang took
off Hines’ temporaries and replaced them with
the new crowns. “They look so white. They look
amazing, and I’m really excited,” Hines said a few
days later.
“Everyone who knew I was getting them said
they look noticeably white and much more even.
My other ones looked kind of fake. They were
really thick, and if you got up close, you could
see the veneer because it was placed on top of the
tooth, so you could really see it. But these look
much more natural. They look just like real teeth,”
she said.
Hines is now ready for her two big days in
December. She will graduate from North Texas
State on Dec. 16 and will get married in her home
town of Abilene the following week. She says she is
thankful to Dr. Chang for giving her the smile that
she has always wanted.
“The first thing I notice about someone is their
smile, and that’s the first thing I notice about
myself, and I just wasn’t happy with it,” Hines
said. “Andy gave me such an amazing opportunity
to finally change that, and I’ll have it for the rest
of my life. The porcelain crowns are made of such
high quality from the lab he uses, and he said
they’ll last me for the rest of my life.”
Carrie Gurr Can’t Stop Smiling
Before Garland resident Carrie Gurr’s first visit
with Dr. Chang, she rarely smiled. If she did smile,
she refused to open her mouth, hiding teeth that
she was embarrassed to reveal. After receiving
cosmetic crown reconstruction on six of her front
teeth, Gurr now can’t stop smiling.
“I looked like a total dufus when I smiled.
That’s why I didn’t smile. Very rarely would you
ever see me smile in a picture until after Dr. Andy
did my work. Now I can’t keep my mouth shut,”
Gurr said.
One of Gurr’s front teeth was knocked out years
ago, leaving a large gap between her front teeth.
Another tooth was replaced, but it eventually
pushed another tooth in the wrong direction,
making the gap look worse, she said.
“They were pretty knarly looking. They weren’t
discolored or anything, but the space and that one
tooth that was growing outward just looked awful,”
Gurr said.
After years of being embarrassed about her
smile, Gurr, a purchasing manager for an access
control manufacturer, said she finally made the
decision to make a change after a co-worker sought
treatment from Dr. Chang following a motorcycle
accident that damaged his teeth.
“The people at work were just amazed at what
he did, and I was just so thrilled. It almost brought
me to tears when I first looked at myself in the
mirror. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s me,’” Gurr said.
Gurr, who still sees Dr. Chang for routine
dental care such as cleanings and general work,
said she had always been impressed by the
professionalism and friendliness of Dr. Chang and
his office staff.
“I adore Angelica (Angelica Lozano has been
a dental assistant for Dr. Chang for seven years.).
She’s very good and she takes the time. You never
feel hurried in his office, they do a really thorough
job, they’re super friendly, and you get in exactly
Dr. Chang and his staff know that going to the
dentist can make many patients nervous, so they
skillfully ease fears and anxieties over treatments,
recovery, side effects and pain by creating an
atmosphere that pampers patients to set them at
ease. Patients can fully relax during treatment by
reclining in chairs that feature heated, vibrating
massage units or watch their favorite DVD.
“We really want to make our patients
comfortable and happy in the dental office,”
Dr. Chang said. “Certainly, anything that is going
to make our patients more comfortable and more
likely to come to the dentist is good.”
Dr. Chang also specializes in “laughing gas”
sedation therapy or oral sedation for those patients
who want to “zone out” during their treatments,
(although they will miss seeing the high-tech
dentistry), if that is the kind of treatment they
chose.
Stephanie Perdue or Fannie Turner is one of
the first people on Dr. Chang’s staff patients see
as they walk through the office door and into a
waiting room filled with soft lighting, cozy chairs, a
wall of Dr. Chang’s degrees, relaxing music and an
“We do everything
on a first-name
basis. We want
them to feel at
home here.”
aquarium brimming with fish and tropical plants.
“We do everything on a first-name basis,”
Perdue said. “We do not want anyone to feel like
just another patient. We’ll get them anything they
need: coffee or a soft drink. We want them to feel
at home here.”
Meanwhile, Angelica Lozano, a dental assistant
for seven years, said she empathizes with patients
because she has sat in the dental chair before.
She is the one who assists Dr. Chang during
procedures.
“I assure them that everything will be OK, that
Dr. Chang is very gentle and that at any time
during the procedure, they can raise their hand
if the need arises, and we’ll give them that time,”
Lozano said. “I’ll go over the exact procedure,
exactly what will happen. I let them know that I’ve
been in the chair as well.”
OCTOBER 2006
INFORM 33
About Dr. Chang
A native of Houston, Dr. Chang received
his undergraduate degree from the
University of Texas in Austin in 1993. After
leaving Austin, Dr. Chang came to Dallas
where he received his doctorate degree
from Baylor College of Dentistry in 1997
and then studied for three more years
toward a Master of Science degree in Oral
Biology en route to becoming a boardeligible prosthodontist as a specialist in
Cosmetic, Restorative and Implant Dentistry
from the American Board of Prosthodontics.
He is completing the process to become
board certified in the specialty field.
His professional memberships include
the American Academy of Cosmetic
Dentistry, the Dental Organization for
Conscious Sedation, the American Dental
Association, the Texas Dental Association,
Dallas County Dental Society, American
College of Prosthodontics, the International
Congress of Oral Implantologists, American
College of Oral Implantology, Academy of
Osseointegration and American Society of
Osseointegration. He has also served as a
part-time associate clinical professor at the
Baylor College of Dentistry’s Department of
Restorative Sciences.
His continuing education includes
cosmetic and restorative dentistry,
infection control, prosthetics, dental
implants, oncologic dentistry, maxillofacial
prosthetics and ceramic laminate veneers.
To learn more about Dr. Andy Chang,
visit his website at www.drandychang.com.
Andy Chang, DDS, MS, PA
1111 N. Floyd Road, Suite D
Richardson, TX 75080
•
972.644.7770
www.drandychang.com
FORT WORTH
Dr. Andy Chang & Dr. James Vargese
1501 Handley Drive
Fort Worth, TX 76112
817-457-1313
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INFORM
ROCKWALL
Dr. Andy Chang & Associates
3023 E. I-30, Suite H
Rockwall, TX 75087
214-771-3130
OCTOBER 2006
OCTOBER 2006
INFORM 35