See What We Can Do for You With Dental Implants
Dental implants are titanium man-made roots, is what they are. There’s nothing as good as what God gave you originally, your own teeth, your own roots, but when you have an incident or a situation where you’re missing a tooth or you get a tooth knocked out or it has to come out for some reason or another, implants are a great option.
You simply place the implant in the bone. The implant has to heal in, or integrate, what we call ‘integrate with the bone’ for about two to three months. After that, then what we do is we put what’s called an ‘abutment’ on the crown. It screws into the implant and then you can cement a crown on top of that.
There’s some different ways to do that. That’s one way to do it. Another way is to include the crown and the abutment together, and you can screw the crown to the implant. Either way, you end up with the same result, but that’s how it works.
When a patient comes in after we’ve done an implant, we’ll have them come back for the postsurgical visit, and they go, “That wasn’t bad at all.” Most of the times, it’s not. Sometimes you may have some discomfort with that. The thing about implant crowns is that does take a little bit of time. You’ve got to wait for the implant to integrate for two, three months, and then you do the process of making the abutment a crown that adds another month. You’re looking at, maybe between four and six months to actually get a tooth in there. When it goes in, the patient’s very happy with it, they’re real pleased. They go, “That wasn’t bad at all, it just took a little time to get there, but it’s great.”