Dental Implants

Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about dental implants and what dental implants are. A dental implant is a titanium screw just like an orthopedic would use in your hand or your foot or your knee. And Dentistry has adapted these screws to be able to use in your mouth to replace missing teeth or add additional teeth to your mouth. They come in different diameters, they come in different platforms, they come in different all kinds of things. different shapes. Our primary dental implant we use is from Noble BioCare. I’ve been using this implant for over 25 years and it’s just the workhorse and reliable implant of our practice. We place implants under sedation, we place implants in the conventional way without using sedation. Most of the implants that we are using are single and double implants meaning one or two implants. in the back of people’s mouths to replace the teeth that they’ve lost for some reason. We can do virtually anything on implants that we want to do as far as replacing teeth.

We can replace a single tooth, we can replace bridge work, we can replace a whole arch, we can replace both arches. When we get into the larger replacement, most of the time we’re gonna suggest doing those on their arches. IV sedation. It’s just easier for the patient, it’s easier for us, it makes the whole process go so smooth. The technology we use to place implants is cutting edge. There’s no technology in the United States or in Europe that is more high tech than what we have right here in Greenwood, Mississippi. We employ a comb beam, which gives us a 3D x -ray, if you will, of your head. so that we can look at your bone in three dimensions and determine where there’s adequate bone for implants. If there’s not adequate bone, we’re able to bone graft, and I’ll go into that a little bit later on. So we employ combine, we employ intra -oil scanners, so we don’t have to take impressions of your mouth with trace. We put a scanner in there. It gives us a scanned image that is a digital copy of your mouth, so we have that on PAL. file. We combined the intra -oil scan with the cone beam and we are now able to 3D print temporary to final bridge work. We can 3D print full bridges, we can 3D print full arches, we can 3D print single crowns. So again it keeps everything right here without you having to travel anywhere. 

I’ll talk a little bit about our bone grafting procedure so when you you’re going to lose a tooth and we’re going to use that bone graft to replace the ridge where the tooth is taken prime. So we may be putting an implant in that site, in that socket site, or we may just be enhancing the ridge for further bridge work down the road. We use a type of bone that we get from Nobel that is a great type of bone and a membrane that will put over the bone to ensure that the bone graft stays in place. So the process goes like this, the tooth is removed, the bone graft material is put into the socket, a bandaid which we call a non -resorbable membrane is put over the socket and this is sutured into place. That’s left alone for four months at that point then we come in and we place our implant in that site. If the jaw bone is completely deficient and that type of bone grafting is not an option, we have another option of block bone grafting where we have a block of bone milled out that is site specific off the cone beam, again off of the intra -oil scanner, and that bone graft is then placed in the deficient area screwed to the jaw. and allowed to incorporate that bone graft with your bone graft. We use a type of blood component that we draw out of your blood to coat over the bone graft to stimulate cell production in there so that your bone recognizes it as bone and grows to it. Then we come back and place implants in that six to nine months later.