Find Out if Dental Implants Are Right For You

From a technological standpoint, dental implants have completely changed the way we all look at tooth loss. There was time, not so long ago when the loss of a tooth meant the prospect of having to deal with things like dentures or even dental bridges. By creating a system that not only replaces the surface tooth, also known as the crown but also the lost root itself, dental implants have brought stability and longevity to tooth replacement. As with any technological advancement, the rise of dental implants in popularity has also given rise to questions from patients. Everybody wants to know if they work (yes), what the procedure is to get them, and if you as an individual qualify to get dental implants. The answer to the final question is also yes, but there are certain requirements you will need to meet in order to ensure you are healthy enough to sustain an implant. To make sure that you are indeed healthy enough and that your mouth can support an implant, we will do an extensive examination. There are a few conditions that may preclude you temporarily or permanently from getting a dental implant. Some of these are found in people with out-of-control diabetes, patients who have cancer and are seeking active radiation treatment, dental patients with untreated periodontal disease, and even patients who have a severe addiction to cigarettes or alcohol. All of these make it so there is an increased risk of the implant not taking, that the body will not adhere to the implant, and thus, the operation will not be as successful as it should be.

Dental implants are successful. There is no question about that, with some studies even placing the success rate of dental implants around 98 percent, though we prefer a more conservative estimate of 94 percent. The reason why implants are so wildly effective is the care we take before we ever start you down the road to getting implants. For every patient who comes in wanting implants, we will start by making sure your jaw has the capacity to withstand and even sustain these implants. To do this, we will begin with a full examination that includes x-rays and a CT scan. This use of dental imaging gives us a clear understanding of the capacity of your jaw and whether or not you need a bone graft to stabilize the jawbone for the implant.

For some patients who have the required density, we can proceed directly to the implant phase, which is known as immediate implant placement. For others, the process may take a little longer, as we will need to perform an alveolar bone graft that targets the upper portion of the jawbone where the teeth are typically located. Using an onlay bone graft, we are able to create a block of bone into which the implant is placed, giving the implant the stability it needs from the bone itself. Healing time is usually around six months between the graft and the date when we can start with the actual implant procedure.

Cosmetic Dentist  >  Oral Surgery

Our Laser Gum Recession Treatment is Superior to Traditional Methods

When it comes to gum recession treatment, our laser treatment options have surpassed traditional methods in many ways. Before you undergo treatment for gum recession, it is important to know your options. Don’t settle for a treatment that will leave you experiencing discomfort. Some traditional methods can leave you in a long recovery period before your gums are completely healed. Continue reading to learn more about the major differences between traditional treatment methods and a laser gum recession treatment.

Traditional Methods

Traditionally, surgery to treat gum recession involved the use of a scalpel and other dental tools to peel back gum tissues in order to access the periodontal pocket (the destroyed area of tissues and bones that is loosened). Once the periodontal pocket and loose tissues are accessed, a dentist will cut these and suture other gum tissue in the area to reduce pocket length. Bone and tissue grafting may additionally be used to reattach gums to the tooth’s surface and to add more tissue to the area. To perform your gum graft tissue will be taken with a scalpel from the roof of your mouth. This sensitive area takes time to heal from an invasive method of removal.
The traditional methods of gum recession treatment do work, but they can also have a long recovery period. Patients may also experience discomfort during treatment even when the area has received an anesthetic. When you take the time to learn about the simple process of laser gum recession treatment as opposed to traditional methods, you may save yourself from unnecessary cutting and have a faster recovery.

Laser Gum Recession Treatment

Our laser gum recession treatment does not require the use of a variety of sharp dental tools like scalpels. For many patients, this cuts down on anxiety and nervousness when facing an oral surgery or gum grafting. With our laser treatment, we will perform a minimally invasive procedure to correct gum recession. Laser treatments do not normally cause pain or discomfort during the procedure and can easily determine which gum tissues are diseased or damaged and which are healthy. This speeds up the procedure and allows us to leave the healthy tissues unaffected. Your gum recession treatment time will be shortened by the use of lasers, and your recovery time will be much shorter. Our laser treatment easily and safely removes unwanted tissues and bacteria that could injure your remaining healthy gums and teeth. Laser treatment also reduces the possibility of inflammation, leading to a more comfortable recovery period.

If you are pursuing treatment for your gum recession, consider the benefits of our laser gum recession treatment. You can significantly cut down on your surgery and recovery time while still receiving amazing results. Our laser treatment accelerates results without compromising quality. Discomfort and the chance of other negative side effects are greatly reduced so visit our office to learn more about our treatment solution and if it is the right one for you.

A Sleep Dentist Can Help You After an Accident

As a sleep dentist, we help a lot of people that have been injured in an accident.  Many people do not think about whether or not they will ever be in a car wreck or other type of accident, if their teeth will ever be damaged or what they would do if it happened to them.  This is understandable, but it often leads people to seek care in the wrong place – the emergency room of a local hospital.  If your tooth was knocked out, visiting the ER will allow you to receive medication, but it will not do anything for your missing tooth or the health of your mouth and jawbone.

Visiting our office will.

If you think that you will never have the challenge of dealing with a lost tooth, here are some facts to consider.  Every year, one in three people over the age of 65 are injured in a slip and fall accident.  These types of accidents are not just reserved for seniors.  They impact men and women of all ages and represent 9 million trips to the ER every year.  For those who play sports, in children alone, there are over 5 million sports injuries annually and that does not even consider how many adults become injured while playing a game of basketball at the gym.  Even driving a car is not safe since around 5.4 million car wrecks happen annually.  With these statistics in mind, it is more of a question of when will you get into an accident and not if you will.  Simultaneously, you never know if your teeth will become damaged in the process.  If they are, be sure to give us a call.  We specialize in oral surgery and can replace any teeth that have been knocked out or correct a jaw that has been damaged.
The benefits of visiting a sleep dentist –

Getting into an accident is traumatic enough. When you have subsequent injuries, it can be difficult to then think about visiting the dentist.  We understand that the thought of receiving dental care is stressful for some people, even if it does not actually cause discomfort.  While recovering from another trauma people tend to avoid anything that could cause them anxiety.  Fortunately, this is unnecessary when you visit our dental office.  As a sleep dentist, we can provide you with the dental care that you need without the anxiety that it brings. We can place you under a light sleep so that the dental work is performed without you being consciously aware of it.  This way your experience will be relaxing and when you wake up, your dental restorations or surgery will have been completed.
As a sleep dentist, one of the most common procedures that we perform is the placing of dental implants.  If your tooth was knocked out in an accident or you lost it due to an infection or gum disease, we can typically replace it with an implant.  This is a permanent solution that works by placing a metal post under the gums and securing it to the jawbone.  The bone and metal will fuse together through the process of osseointegration to form a new root system that your new tooth can be attached to.  All of this can be completed while you are fast asleep.

Are You Healthy Enough for Traditional Oral Surgery?

Oral surgery should never be taken lightly. If you need it, you should receive it soon before more long term damage is done to your oral health. Traditional oral surgery may not be for everybody though. If your health is at stake, it is important to seriously ask yourself if you are well enough for traditional oral surgery. It can be a more invasive procedure and a potentially harmful procedure for people who have had recent illnesses or have current serious health problems that make them more vulnerable. If you are concerned that you are not healthy enough, or you do not want to endure the long recovery period that comes with some surgeries like gum grafting, visit our office for an alternative option that works wonders. 

Traditional oral surgery still works excellently and is advised for many patients, but if your health puts you in an at-risk category, our laser therapy might be the best option for you. Our laser surgery uses an intense beam of light to correct dental flaws. Unwanted or unneeded tissue is easily vaporized with the laser energy. Lasers can also be a wonderful alternative to classic root planing and scaling. Our dental lasers gently remove bacteria and infection as they cleanse your gums and teeth. These lasers are often used to clean infected areas prior to another laser surgery like a gum graft. The pros of laser oral surgery are unlimited, but a few of the main uses and desirous qualities are listed following.

The Pros of Laser Oral Surgery:
Dental laser oral surgery is quicker and more efficient than traditional methods.
The use of lasers can detect early decay in your teeth.
Lasers remove bacteria more quickly than traditional dental tools.
Laser therapy is a less invasive way to remove the infection below the gum line if you have periodontal disease.
Lasers can reshape your gums after periodontal disease as an alternative to gum grafting.
Laser surgery cuts down on recovery time because it is so minimally invasive. The laser heat can jumpstart healing.
Laser heat seals blood vessels and minimizes the need for sutures after a procedure.
Our dental lasers can cut through and drain a tooth abscess for fast relief.
We can use our lasers to gently remove small potentially cancerous bits of oral tissue to send it in for a biopsy.
Dental lasers can be used to remove lesions or sores that might be causing discomfort.
With dental lasers, you don't have to fear the ominous sound of a dental drill. This can be helpful for people who suffer from dental phobia.

Our laser oral surgery minimizes discomfort, and the potential for swelling following a procedure is reduced.
Although the pros of dental laser oral surgery far outweigh the cons, there is sometimes still a need for traditional oral surgery. In cases where your immune system is already compromised, we definitely encourage you to pursue a laser oral surgery first as it will more easily maintain your oral health as your immune system continues to heal.

Laser Dentistry  >  Oral Surgery

How Implant Dentistry Can Benefit You

The primary focus of implant dentistry is to provide you with a strong, stable, and great looking replacement when you have lost a tooth. For your natural teeth, the job of stability and strength falls to the root. The root also has a symbiotic relationship with the jawbone that helps it to provide additional support for your tooth. In order to replicate the work done by the root, we use a tiny titanium screw that is placed directly into your jawbone, in most cases, which not only gives your new tooth the security it needs but also imitates the relationship with the jawbone. There are numerous reasons we can give you as to why you should consider using implant dentistry to replace a lost tooth. The most popular reason we have heard from our patients is the convenience. Since the dental implant is virtually the same as a tooth, in many aspects, it requires no additional maintenance and places no further limitations on what you can and cannot eat. For many people this ability to carry one with their lifestyle, despite having lost a tooth, is the critical component to choosing implant dentistry over some of the other alternatives.

As implant dentistry continues to make great stride in improving the quality of people's lives after they have lost teeth, there is more information available about them and more patients who actually come in with some information about implants. This is good because it then allows us to work with you on understanding the process even better and explaining some of the nuances. It also allows us to create a plan that will help you reach your goals with implant dentistry. For example, most people know about implant dentistry using a tiny titanium screw that is placed directly into the jawbone. This is known as an Endosteal Implant, and is definitely the most common type of implant that we use. However, we base the type of implant we use on the amount of bone density available and if the jaw bone can actually sustain an implant. If we find that your jaw cannot sustain a regular implant, we have the option of doing what is known as a Subperiosteal implant. A Subperiosteal implant is placed in the gum but slightly above the jawbone, or resting on the jawbone so that there is no added pressure placed on the already weakened bone structure.

Another small nugget that we like to sometimes share with patients is that there are two schools of thought when it comes to the healing process after the implant has been placed. One group favors a one-step approach. This approach completes the implant surgery by covering the implant with tissue and then leaving it to heal naturally. The bone and the gum tissue heal over a period of 4 to 6 weeks. The other school of thought is to use a two-step approach. In this method, the dentist places a small device known as a dental abutment over the implant, allowing for the bone and tissue to heal around it. The healing takes exactly the same amount of time as the one-step approach though the abutment does provide some additional protection.

Cosmetic Dentist  >  Gum Recession

What is Laser Dentistry, How Does it Work, and How Can it Help Me?

 Laser dentistry is the way of the future.  Based in modern medical science, a laser is a device that emits a narrow and very intense beam of light that neither diffuses nor spreads out. When focused at close range, these beams act on tissue. Laser dentistry employs this beam to shape or even remove soft or hard tissue. While this may sound bizarre or even painful, in certain procedures, lasers have several distinct advantages over more conventional forms of dentistry.

1) Lasers are Precise: Because lasers are precision instruments, a laser dentist can, with great accuracy, remove unhealthy tissue, without doing any damage to the surrounding healthy tissue. Some procedures may not even require sutures.

2) Minimize Bleeding: The high-energy light helps to coagulate blood, thus reducing bleeding.

3) Lasers Speed Up Healing Time: because the high-energy beam sterilizes the area, the risk of bacterial infection is reduced which speeds up the healing.  This is one of the main benefits of laser dentistry since it allows you to feel normal, faster.

4) Lasers Reduce The Need For Anesthesia: A laser dentist has much less need to use anesthesia because lasers can often be used in place of painful drilling and incisions.

5) Lasers are Quiet: While this may not sound like a technologically important point, the sound of a conventional  drill often makes patients very uncomfortable and anxious.  When using lasers, our patients are more relaxed and comfortable in general.

Lasers and Gum Disease

Lasers were approved by the FDA in the early 90's and are fast becoming the instrument of choice in a number of dental procedures. Laser dentistry is especially effective in treating gum disease, most notably Gingivitis and Periodontitis.  Since we specialize in using lasers to treat gum disease, many people visit our office that are under the care of a general dentist, but are interested in a faster and more comfortable treatment.

What you should know about gum disease.

Gingivitis happens when there is an inflammation of the gums, caused by bacteria and plaque buildup. Typically the gums are red,  inflamed and bleed during tooth brushing. While,  characterized by redness and swelling, chronic and untreated gingivitis leads to Periodontitis, which is a far more serious condition.

Periodontitis is when the gum recedes from the teeth, forming pockets that collect debris. Plaque spreads below the gum line, and as the pockets become infected, the bacteria begin to destroy the connective tissue that holds the teeth in place. The teeth get loose and eventually fall out. Periodontitis is the primary cause of tooth loss in adults.

Gum disease is primarily caused by poor oral hygiene that leads to the buildup of plaque. However, are a number of other factors, including hormonal changes that can occur during pregnancy and puberty, etc. can cause gum disease. Also included are certain medications, illnesses that affect the immune system, and a family history of gum disease.

Prior to laser technology, treating periodontal or gum disease was a matter of deep cleaning the pockets of all plaque and tartar, which harbor the bacteria, along with a course of strong antibiotics. In more advanced cases, the procedure could be classified as surgery. However, all too often the periodontal disease came back, which caused many to wonder if the disease could ever be fully and finally cured. However, lasers have considerably simplified and improved the treatment by vaporizing diseased tissue, and killing the bacteria that caused the disease. Since there are no strains of bacteria that can resist the laser, you can be certain that your gums will start to heal.  By using laser dentistry, we can even help healthy gum tissue to surround your teeth like it once did.  This is a revolutionary way to treat this age-old problem so call our office to learn more.

The Link Between Gum Recession and Smoking

Smoking is a common habit, but many people do not realize it is a direct link to gum recession. There are many alarming stories about smoking and the negative effects it may have on your general health, but many people do not know that it can also greatly affect your oral health by creating an increased risk for gum disease and even oral cancer. Gum recession is a common issue in adults, and the cause is often not realized. If you have a history of smoking, you may fall victim to gum recession, or you could possibly already be experiencing it. The risk of gum disease and one of its major accomplices, gum recession, increases substantially when you smoke cigarettes or use tobacco in any form.

One of the first signs of periodontal disease, a detrimental condition that develops in your gums and causes deep infection and tooth loss, is gum recession. When you have not kept up with dental visits or made oral hygiene a priority, you may fall prey to periodontal disease. A few other factors, like smoking, can also contribute to the potential development of the condition. Since smoking involves direct contact with nicotine, smoke, and other toxins to your teeth, gums, tongue, and the roof of your mouth, all of those tissues become weakened over time, increasing your chances of gum recession. Every time that you smoke you become more susceptible to developing problems with your gums. If gum recession is caught in the beginning stages, it can be slowed and nearly reversed, but if smoking continues and gum recession persists, you can have irreversible and unappealing damage that causes great discomfort. Even if your gum recession can be helped, smokers have a slower healing process because their oral tissue is generally weaker than the average non-smoker.

Not only does gum recession mar your appearance, it can also cause you to experience discomfort when you eat due to the exposed nerve endings near your teeth. These exposed nerve endings make your teeth more susceptible to decay. Even if your teeth are worked on and preventative measures are taken, you may still be subjected to tooth loss because of continued smoking. These problems are a physical and financial burden. Replacing lost teeth can be expensive and time-consuming, and your replacement teeth may never be as high-functioning as your natural teeth were. However, if you have your gums treated at the first sign of gum disease, the damage can be reversed, and your teeth may be saved.

If you smoke and already have some gum recession, we are able to help. If you are a smoker and are not sure if your gums are showing signs of recession, we can tell you. You can also watch for signs that include red and swollen gums, bleeding gums, and teeth that appear longer than normal. If you have neglected your oral health by continued smoking, now is the time to start paying attention. Visit our office at the first sign of a problem to give yourself the best chance of having healthy gums and retaining your natural teeth.