Dental Implants

Dental Implant Success Rate

Dental implants are among the most successful and reliable dental restoration available to restore missing teeth. Generally, dental implants are placed with local anesthesia, in about one hour, and the patient goes back home or to work with minimal to no pain. It is a tribute to high-tech dental methods to have made the availability of dental implants quick, easy and effective.

Benefits of Dental Implants

Dental implants are not hot or cold sensitive and do not decay. They are solid, chew like natural teeth and most patients that have dental implants are 100% satisfied. For patients who wear dentures, dental implants add stability to the denture far superior to any brand of denture adhesive. If the patient is missing one or two teeth, dental implants look, feel and chew like your own teeth.

Shopping for Dental Implants

Dental implants come in many shapes and sizes and can replace one tooth, several teeth or a mouthful of teeth. A dentist has to see you and a current set of x-rays to figure out which type of implant would work best for you. This is why "shopping" over the phone for a dentist is not the most ideal. Implants should last a lifetime, so you want to go to an experienced dentist who can successfully complete the treatment in a short period of time. Choosing a dentist based on his or her fee does not provide a guarantee for the effectiveness of treatment. Naturally the dentist with the lowest fee will use the cheapest materials and techniques. Over the long term, the dentist with the lowest fee could end up being far more expensive, time consuming and painful.

Dental Implant Brands

With technology changing constantly, there are new brands and variations of new brands with different connections and surfaces that are supposed to work better. New brands and new styles of implants are developed faster than research can evaluate their effectiveness. By the time we find out why a particular style, shape or brand fails, it has already been replaced with something else. There are major brands like Astra, Nobel Biocare and ITI that have proven track records.

No Dental Implants for Maya

Maya did not have enough jawbone or enough space between her teeth to replace her missing teeth with dental implants. Her treatment would have taken much longer and would have been much more complicated with bone graft surgeries and braces. She refused this course of treatment and chose instead a style of Face Lift Dentistry ® that utilized fixed zirconium porcelain bridges rather than dental implants. This course of treatment took only 3 weeks! (Bone grafting, dental implants and orthodontics would have taken over 2 years.)