Dental Implants

So dental implants are actually the best way to replace teeth that are going to be the most like your natural teeth. A dental implant is basically a titanium post that gets placed into the jawbone and after it fully heals and integrates into the jawbone, then we're able to basically attach a tooth to it. So we can replace a tooth from the root to the crown with a dental implant. Prosthetically, we can even use dental implants to attach a bridge of teeth where we have multiple teeth that are joined together, fused together to a replace a full arch of teeth. Many patients are concerned about having a dental implant placed thinking that it's going to be painful. What I'll tell those patients is most of the time the placement of the dental implant is much easier than having that tooth extracted. At Harrison Dental Group when we start planning for a dental implant, we almost always get a cone beam CT scan of the patient. What that means is we're getting a three-dimensional x-ray so we can plan out exactly where we want to place the implant in the bone. Another thing we can do sometimes is we'll make a surgical guide which is basically a plastic mouth piece that fits over the teeth to have a hole exactly where we want to place our dental implant. So then there's no room for error and it's very predictable, and easy. Several of our dentists place dental implants, they're very available to our patients to have here in-house. We do that at multiple locations as well. Any patient is a candidate for dental implants, but there are certain conditions that make dental implants a little more challenging. After placing a dental implant, typically we'll wait a few months for that bone to heal around the implant and once that implant is solidly healed within the bone, then that would be the time when we can attach the crown to the implant.