Dental Implants

Dental implants are a dental prosthetic, typically made out of titanium, that are used to place in the patient's mouth and in their jaw bone to replace one tooth or several missing teeth, or even can be used in a situation where the patient has no teeth and they could be used to help support a prosthetic that either snaps into place or a prosthetic that may be screwed in there and stays in there completely. Now we take a 3D scan so that we can completely see the height and the width and the volume of the bone to make certain that they have adequate bone to place a dental implant. These days, if an implant is placed on the lower jaw, we typically wait about three months before we can put the final prosthetic or crown on it. If it's on the upper jaw, we typically wait about four months before we place the final crown. That procedure has actually become, you know, quite simple in many instances and can be done pain-free and can be done, you know, very quickly and very easily. A dental implant procedure, a very simple procedure can take, you know, truly less than an hour once we've done all our preliminary work. So it's a very simple procedure in the office that requires dental anesthetic around the area that we're working on and truly with guided type of surgery, it's an appointment that can be done very easily, very quickly and very correctly in a short amount of time. Recovery time post-implant, you know, typically, I tell the patients, you know, they may have just a mild amount of pain, if any. I typically ask them to take, you know, something like an Advil or Tylenol for the next couple of days if that's something they can take. But most of the time they really don't need anything like that. So the big benefit is we don't disturb adjacent tooth structure. You have a prosthetic that really acts like the natural root of your tooth, and then we place a restoration, a crown over the top of that, that you'll be able to chew and function with just like you did with your natural tooth. You'll be able to floss in between it to keep it nice and healthy because it's also important to keep the implant healthy just as it is to take care of the rest of your teeth that way. And then it's probably one of the most successful things that we do in dentistry.