VIP DENTAL LOUNGE

Dr. Lyuda: Hi my name is Dr. Lyuda, and let’s talk about dental implants today. One of the most common reasons to place a dental implant, is to replace a missing tooth. Back in the good, old days, we’ve been damaging good, perfectly functioning teeth to replace a missing tooth by placing bridges. Not anymore. We can place an implant straight into your bone, not touching adjacent teeth, and it can function and look just like your natural tooth.

If you have a decayed tooth, which means it has a really big cavity, and unfortunately it can no longer be saved, and we have to take it out, we can also replace that almost immediately. Sometimes we can do it on the day of extraction, when we take the tooth out. We can immediately place an implant, and you can have your function in no time, in just a few months.

Another reason for dental implants is if you’ve been missing teeth completely, and you’ve been wearing dentures for a while. Everyone knows of some of those embarrassing moments where you could be eating and it kind of shifts and dislodges or you sneeze and it comes off. Well, not anymore. You would no longer have to use those adhesives. That denture can snap on, literally snap on to those implants and it’s going to hold on tight and you can enjoy all the foods that you always wanted to eat, like corn on the cob, and steak.

Dr. Lyuda: We use a lot of technology to precisely place an implant where it’s supposed to be. The first step is to take a cone beam, which is a three dimensional scan that allow us to rotate your mandible, which is the lower part of your jaw, or the maxilla, which is the upper part of the jaw and look for any diseases, whether they’re in the sinuses or the jaw itself. The depth of the bone. The width of the bone. The locations of your nerves.

And precisely to the millimeter, place the location and depth where the implant is going to go. So, the hardest part does not happen on the day of surgery. It happens behind the scenes, when we’re actually treatment plan where the implant is going to go. So if it’s a single implant that we’re placing, just to replace one tooth, we’re checking to see how close we are to the sinuses, if we’re placing it on the top, or how close we are to the nerve, if we’re placing it on the bottom.

How much bone we have, if we need to place any grafting material to make the bone bigger, so that we can select an appropriate size of the implant and to make the bone look a lot more aesthetically pleasing. Because if we have those indentations in the bone, it’s going to look really awkward and unnatural.

If we’re placing multiple implants, it gives us information where it’s best to place those implants, so we pick the place with the most amount of bone, trying to be safe, not to injure any nerves or perforate sinuses, and to also design where implants are going to go to give you the greatest stability for the denture so that the forces can be distributed appropriately.

Once the treatment plan is complete, with the CT scan, we use a software to print a 3D surgical guide, so we use a guided surgery to place implants at VIP. It takes away the human error on the day of surgery and it allow us to place an implant at a precise location at its precise depth.

Dr. Lyuda: Let me show you what I mean. For example, this is a case where this tooth is meaning. The dental implant is placed inside your bone, so you will not be able to see it. A lot of times, patients ask me “What does it look like?” And “Will I be able to actually see it?” It goes inside your bone, underneath your gum, completely invisible to you or anybody else, unless we take an x-ray.

Let me show you, I’m going to peel off this gum, and here it is. So, an implant or the whole process of replacing a tooth has three parts to it. An implant, an abutment, and a crown. So an implant serves to replace the actual root of your tooth and to preserve the bone, it actually sends the signals to your brain that we need to preserve the bone to protect the implant.

If the implant or the root is missing, your bone is going to degrade over time. It’s going to shrink in width and it’s going to shrink in height. The second part is the abutment that goes inside the implant that serves as a foundation for the crown to be placed on. And the third is the crown.

Once the implant is placed and the abutment is screwed inside the implant, a crown, what we know as a tooth, is placed on top of that and serves as your natural and beautiful tooth like the rest of them.

Speaker 1: (singing)

Speaker 2: Let’s take a look at the simulation. This is a tooth, front tooth that we are taking out. We’re taking the cross section of your jaw that now shows us a hole, which is called a socket where the implant is going to replace where the root used to be. These are the three components of the implant I was mentioning earlier. We have an implant, which replaces the root of the tooth. It’s placed inside the bone covered by a gum, so nobody can see it. Then we have an abutment with a screw. It’s a one part that is going to be screwed inside the implant itself. Then the crown that is going to go on top of the abutment. Let’s take a look how it’s down. Wala, you have a brand new tooth that looks and function just like the rest of your teeth.

Speaker 1: I get a very common question asked a lot, if implants are painful? That’s probably one of the biggest driving factors of people not placing implants. You’ll be surprised, a majority of the time our patients don’t even take medication, pain medication after the implant is placed. It’s a lot easier than taking a tooth out.
We know the dental implants are an investment and that’s why we would like to give you a lifetime warranty. The implants that we use in VIP are engineered in Basel, Switzerland and have the highest 10 year success of all the implants out there, allowing us to give you that lifetime warranty.