Teeth in an Hour
Sounds fantastic, but is reality today. Essentially, we work together with your restorative doctor or general practitioner to take all the necessary measurements prior to your actual surgical appointment, so everything is placed in one appointment. That is correct! Your implants are placed and the final fixed prosthesis, or bridge, is seated during the same appointment. View Animation
This procedure deals mainly with patients who have lost all of their upper or lower teeth, or both. They may have full dentures and realize how difficult it is to get used to chewing with such limited prostheses. They are looking to improve their self image, confidence while eating and smiling, simple things lost with the loss of natural teeth. These new techniques allow us to restore your mouth with fixed teeth in a short period of time and one appointment to approach the quality of life you experienced when you had your natural teeth.
The procedures take advantage of computer aided design and computer aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) of surgical guides to allow us to plan in advance exactly where the dental implants should be placed to precisely fit to the prefabricated fixed bridge.
What you get as the patient is fixed, non-removable teeth that stay in your mouth just as your natural teeth did originally, and usually within a one hour appointment. We work with your restorative doctor in close concert as a team to deliver your return to a much better quality of life with stable, fixed teeth.
Technically, a series of impressions are made of your mouth and a transitional denture or prosthesis is fabricated to simulate the position of the new bridge. You then have a CT scan performed in our office with our latest addition of high-tech equipment, a dental CT scanner.
Called the "I-Cat", it takes an incredible 3-D image of a patient in twenty seconds, while seated very comfortably in an open environment. And, since it is digital in nature, it requires less exposure than a typical panoral radiograph.
We then use the digital data for our computer to plan your implant placement positions and the final bridge in virtual reality.
The information is sent to a facility that in turn fabricates guides and parts of the fixed bridge for our dental laboratory to use to fabricate the final prosthesis. It is done with such incredible precision as to allow the implants and bridge to be seated on the same appointment, achieving an accuracy of less than a tenth of a millimeter.
Literally, at the end of the appointment, you can eat an apple!
