Dental Implants

I get that question a lot from patients, "What is a dental implant?" and it's something that we throw around really easily here at the office. A dental implant is a fixture that we can put in your jawbone that will allow us a lot of different restorative options to restore missing teeth. The first step in the process is to come back to the basics, get some diagnostic casts and diagnostic records. We take a 3D CBCT x-ray. After the 3D x-rays are completed, and the treatment planning is completed, we figure out the perfect size implant for the amount of bone that's left in that site to maximize the strength of the future prosthetics that we can attach to it. We just get the patient numb. Make them nice and comfortable, and it's a couple of really easy steps where we make what's called an osteotomy. It goes into the bone, and we make room to put the screw into the bone. After the implant has been placed, it takes approximately three to four months for the body to . . . Well, I always joke with my patients too. For them to become bionic, but it's for the bone to grow around the implant. Once we know that the implant is stable, it comes back to the question of, "Well, why did we put it there to begin with?" Are we replacing a single tooth, or are we replacing all of the teeth? Are we attaching some dentures to it? But at that point, it's possible to go ahead and restore that implant. If it's as simple as replacing a tooth, which is the most common reason that we do dental implants, then we can go ahead and get the 3D scans and impressions to design the crown that's finally going to be attached to that implant. At that point, we're able to design the crown, and we can turn that around as quick as 24 hours. So it can be a long process. It's not something that happens overnight. There's a lot that goes into it beforehand to make the surgery appointment very easy. Not every dentist feels competent enough to place dental implants themselves. However, here at Verde Pointe, all three of the dentists are comfortable and competent enough to place dental implants from beginning to end, from the restorative and to the surgical portion, and that's not something that you can get at every office. Most patients tell me, after having their implant placed, that they take a couple of Advils that afternoon, and they wake up the next morning, and they're really not sore. Most patients can pretty much go back to work the next day or the day after that. A bit of feedback people give about dental implants is how natural it feels to have a tooth back in that site, and how nice it is to be able to chew, smile, and function without the fear of some denture or some partial falling out of their mouth.