For patients suffering from badly damaged or missing teeth, Dr. Rohinton Patel and the Hawaii Pacific Dental Group team place dental implants. Their practice was one of the first in the nation to use guided implant surgery to more accurately place implants and improve patient results. Treatment is made convenient with our in-office CEREC® machine, which can create the restoration for a patient's implant within an hour.
So a dental implant is a synthetic tooth root, oftentimes made of titanium. It's screwed into the patient's jawbone, where their tooth root once was that had to be removed. Tooth roots have to be removed for a variety of reasons, due to infection or fractures. The advantage of having a dental implant is that once it integrates into the bone it maintains the level of the bone to compare to an older fashion modality of replacing a tooth, such as a bridge or a denture. Additionally, dental implants are a far more conservative option because we don't have to touch the adjacent neighboring teeth to rehabilitate a missing tooth area.
Many patients are good candidates for dental implants. However, it's a case by case basis that we have to examine. In our practice, we use the most cutting edge technology available in implant surgery today. By the use of something called a cone beam CT scan, we can scan our patients in about 15 seconds and diagnose the quality and quantity of their bone levels and structures, aiding us to know what type of candidate they are for a dental implant surgery.
Once we have that cone beam CT scan and the patient has been approved to be a good candidate for dental implant, we have a digital marking of the patient's tooth structure that's sent to a laboratory to create something called a surgical guide stands. Thereby, we utilize a very minimally invasive technique called guided implant surgery.
Our practice was amongst the first in the nation to begin that treatment. Our practice uses a Cerec milling machine, whereby we can create abutments and crowns to rehabilitate the top portion of the implant, the tooth portion that we see in the mouth in about one hour. Our implants patients are often very pleased with the outcome of rehabilitating their teeth. They often get teeth where they never thought they could have them before.
And implants function like regular teeth. You brush them, floss them and eat with them as you would a natural tooth. The longevity of most implants last throughout our patients' lives once the implant has been integrated well into the bone structure of the jaw.
