Dental Implants

Dental implants - titanium posts that are anchored to the jawbone to support dental prosthetics - provide a long-term solution for missing or heavily damaged teeth. At our Orange County, California dental practice, we can help restore the functionality and appearance of your smile with dental implants.

DR. TY CALDWELL: Implants are an excellent service for patients that need it. Today we had a patient that walked in with a tooth that broke off, and in one visit, we can remove the tooth and replace the missing root with a bionic root, essentially. It's about the same shape as your natural tooth. The bone grows to that. I think of it as an ice cream cone--we put the little scoop of ice cream on top, which is the part that you actually see, and you walk out with a beautiful-looking tooth. We were reviewing cases just the other day of treatment that we've done for patients over the last decade or two, and I went over and over lots of cases, and as I looked and reviewed, I couldn't tell which were the false teeth and which for the real teeth. So for the last decade, those people have been happily smiling. It's really a miracle to be able to give a patient their tooth back, and not have to hook on to the other teeth. The process of an implant is very simple--either you're missing a tooth, or you have to have a tooth taken out. So there's a need. We create a space for the implant, we insert the implant, and essentially we close you up and let the bone heal around that. Once the bone's healed, we add an extension piece--we call it an abutment--and then we customize the crown to go over the top of that. At the end, you should have a very secure, very aesthetic, very comfortable tooth that will last and function for years and years. Often a patient's missing one tooth and will replace just one tooth with an implant. But if somebody has, let's say, no teeth, you wouldn't have to put an implant in for every tooth. Often we can put in four to six implants, and build a case across those implants to restore the entire arch. There are lots of stories with implants that come to mind, but I remember one patient who came in, and he had a beautiful smile, but he fell while white-water rafting, and hit his tooth against a rock and broke it off. And we explained to him he was going to loose his tooth, and he started to cry, and this is a man that's about 35 years old. And I told him it was fixable, and he said, "Ty, you don't understand," he said, "I got voted best smile in high school." His smile was so important to him. And when we were finished, he walked out and his smile looked every bit as good as it ever did, and he cried again--and so that was wonderful.