Are you a good candidate for dental implants in North Naples? Are dental implants appropriate to resolve your tooth loss and achieve your goals? The best way to determine the answer to those questions is to converse with a dentist near you with knowledge of your medical history, dental condition, and goals.
The benefits of dental implants
Dental implants comprised of titanium posts, abutments, and carefully custom-crafted restorations provide five key benefits:
- They’re permanent and fixed solutions for tooth loss
- They allow you to speak and eat naturally
- By permitting you to eat naturally, they contribute to improved overall health and nutrition
- They are designed from materials crafted to appear and feel natural
- Implants can restore your confidence, self-esteem, and youthful appearance
The first step in every dental implant procedure is a careful and thorough assessment of your jaw, gums, natural teeth, medical and dental history, and personal oral care habits. If you’re at the earliest stage of considering dental implants as a solution for tooth loss, you may wonder what that assessment will look like. Here’s what is likely to be discussed with a dentist near you.
What to expect from a dental implant consultation
Your dentist will ask what you want to accomplish and what you expect from implants. Implants are not replacement teeth. They’re replacement roots that can support a variety of restorations to achieve many different dental solutions. This discussion of goals and expectations is an opportunity to make sure that you know all those options and possibilities and for your dentist to recommend the best solution to meet your expectations.
Some factors in a patient’s medical and dental history — poor bone density, presence of periodontitis, smoking history, bite complications, and medications you may be taking — may make you an inappropriate candidate for dental implants. Even if those factors don’t rule out a candidate, they may make dental implant procedures more involved or suggest that other options would be more effective, efficient, or economical. For this reason, every assessment will include a careful review of your medical and dental history. You should attend the assessment prepared to answer a wide variety of questions.
An implant-related consultation at a dental office in North Naples will involve taking digital images of your teeth, jaws, and mouth to ensure a full understanding of their condition. Those images may include CT scans, digital photos, and X-rays.
After your initial consultation, your dentist will produce a treatment plan for dental implants (or perhaps alternative solutions if you were ruled out as a candidate for implants) to resolve your tooth loss. That treatment plan will summarize the information gleaned at your assessment and include your dentist’s best recommendation for proceeding.
What happens next?
Once you’ve asked — and your dentist and their staff have answered — every question about the treatment plan and recommendation, the next step in the implant process will be attending the North Naples dental office for the surgery. Precisely what type of surgery you undergo will depend on the treatment plan developed for you. Options include tooth extractions to accommodate the implants, bone grafting, and other jaw modifications to accommodate implants. Ultimately, the implants will be placed in your jaw, then given time to bond to your jaw by osseointegration before treatment proceeds several weeks later.
Dental implants require an investment of time, effort, and money. As a prelude to making those investments, we encourage you to investigate all your options for resolving tooth loss. Do more than just perform web searches and talk amongst your family and networks. Contact a dentist near you and ask for a consultation to reap the benefit of our expertise.