Dental Implants

A dental implant is simply a root replacement. Yes, it's a threaded cylinder that has a hole that you can screw another screw into that allows us to attach a tooth. The titanium material of a dental implant is a material that allows bone to grow onto it or bond to it. So you have a bad root, you need a root replacement, we get you to an oral surgeon or a periodontal surgeon who removes your root and places that titanium implant body for us or root replacement. You'll be allowed to heal for a few weeks, couple of months, and then you'll come see us and we'll be able to unscrew a little cap off of that root replacement that will let us attach a new tooth to it. The process for getting a dental implant, especially to replace a single tooth is as easy as sliding down a slide. We'll simply refer you to our oral surgeon partner, they'll consult with you, take a three-dimensional x-ray picture of the area of your jawbone where we'll need to replace a tooth. You'll have one little, short surgery of 45 minutes or less, and yes, you can be put to sleep and four months later we'll come in with a little video camera and videotape the inside of your mouth. So no messy impressions. A dental laboratory will use that a digital file that we record from your mouth to fabricate a crown that we will finish with our laboratory capabilities, and we'll see you about three weeks after the videotaping of the inside of your mouth or intraoral scanning to deliver your implant crown. This whole process start to finish is about five months or 20 weeks and it works perfectly almost every time. Patient feedback about dental implants is always positive. It's positive because dental implants look like real teeth, they feel like real teeth, and they chew like real teeth. It's a rebuilding or reconstruction procedure that rarely produces remorse because we produce an outcome that is essentially the same as what the patient had before, a single tooth is broken or been damaged by caries and that single tooth is removed with the implant placed and later the crown on top of it. And no one is ever the wiser. And that's one of the things that I love about the dentistry on implants to begin with, is that after it's all healed up and placed, it looks like it never happened.