Dental Implant Restoration
Great Falls, MT
 Dental implants are a great way to restore missing teeth. This system does more than place a false tooth, it rebuilds the root or base of the tooth, allowing the patient to have a full independently restored tooth. Patients are increasingly inquiring about this system due to its high rate of success even after more than a decade of wear.
Our staff at River's Edge Dental is happy to evaluate your dental care needs and design a customized treatment plan for you, which may include dental implants.
What Is a Dental Implant?
When a patient loses a tooth or multiple teeth, they have a few options for tooth replacement. There are traditional dental bridges, partials or even full dentures, depending on your needs. The question is how this device will be held in place or retained, in your mouth. Traditional methods include cementing a bridge over neighboring teeth to hold it in place, using clasps for partial dentures that wrap around neighboring teeth, or using suction and glue to keep dentures in. None of these options are ideal. Cementing a bridge on neighboring teeth means permanently altering otherwise healthy teeth. Clasps wear healthy teeth as they rub and grind with shifting and the motion of chewing. Suction and glues for dentures are never great; they only provide minimal retention and most people with dentures find themselves in embarrassing situations when suction and glue fail.
Dental implants provide a stable, permanent retention that does not rely on neighboring teeth, and will never come out. A dental implant is a surgically placed titanium rod that we sink directly into your jawbone. With this now permanent metal post, we can retain your device, including dental crowns, bridges, partial and full dentures, directly to it. Long-term evaluation and research have shown this restoration to be the most successful of all dental restorations with a greater than 98% success rate after ten years of use.
The Dental Implant Process
There are many options with dental implants; they come in a variety of widths and lengths allowing us to design treatment for your specific replacement needs. Most implants require sufficient bone mass to sink the implant into requiring many patients to have a simple bone graft procedure performed before placement. A bone graft is a painless, easy step, but can take months to grow the needed bone.
After we have established healthy bone, the surgery itself is fast. We first ensure that the patient is comfortable with an anesthetic, most patients find a local anesthetic to be sufficient, but we can discuss that before surgery. The tissue is then opened up to expose the bone, we use a specialized drill to create space in the bone, the implant is placed, and the tissue is sutured closed. The entire process often takes less than one hour. Following surgery, patients will need to wait for a healing period before we can place the prosthetic. Tissue healing is fast, but bone healing can take 2–3 months.
Immediate Load Dentures
Immediate load dentures are a quickly growing concept in dentistry, mostly because they are wonderful. This means that with 4–6 dental implants, we can surgically attach your denture device all in one day. With implant retained dentures you can feel secure in your denture staying put. |
