In today’s focus on dentistry, we’ll talk about a situation where you’ve been told you’ll lose all of your teeth, and you’d like to have them all replaced in one day. Is that possible? Let’s talk about it.
Hi, I’m Dr. Paul Henny and I’ll spend a few minutes in this segment talking about some of the newer advances in dentistry. In the past, there have been individuals often by no fault of their own who have been kind of predestined to lose some or all of their teeth. And these people were pretty much destined to wear dentures for the rest of their life. And this situation for everybody involved, the dentist didn’t really want to have to make dentures for people and that individual certainly didn’t want to lose their teeth, and go to that type of solution.
That was the state of dentistry for probably over a hundred years. Up until, maybe fifteen or twenty years ago when new techniques, where we could leverage use of dental implants, and we had a situation where remaining teeth could be removed and replacement teeth could actually be put in on the very same day. This is an idea that is absolutely revolutionary at it’s core but it’s been made possible by computer imaging as well as advanced dental implant techniques and what I’m talking about is a technique that’s sometimes called ‘all in four’ or ‘teeth in a day’. You’ll see advertisements sometimes on the nightly news where people fly off to Philadelphia or to Phoenix or to some remote location where they’ll have all their remaining teeth removed and immediately that day other teeth will be put in their place.
This type of thing is actually available here locally. It’s something that I’ve been doing in this practice for about six years now. We were really the first practice in all of Virginia to get this involved in this new technique and it’s actually pretty exciting. It’s certainly traumatic for an individual to be in a situation where they’ll lose all their teeth but actually more traumatic is the idea of how are they going to function when that happens. And if we can actually give them teeth to function with the same day when their remaining teeth are removed, they can get to work usually within a week or a few days, and they can function both on a social and a functional level pretty darn well right out of the gate. This is a great advancement for some people. Let me just explain briefly how this is done.
We take molds and images of people’s jaws and bite and aesthetic appearance and we actually preplan teeth in advance that will actually fit in somebody’s mouth before they’re even removed. And then using sophisticated planning techniques and computer imagery, we can determine where we want to place implants in jawbones. Teeth can be removed and implants can be placed the very same day, and teeth can be fitted to those implants, all in the same day.
It sounds horrible. It sounds like you would be suffering for days but in actuality most patients do really, really well with it. The amount of swelling and post-op problems are pretty minimal.
If you’d like to learn more about it please give me a call. It’s something I can share with you because I have a lot of experience with it—I also have a number of patients that I’ve treated who’d probably be more than happy to talk with you about it as well. It’s a technique called ‘all in four’, please give us a call at (540) 774-1577.
I’m Dr. Paul Henny, thanks for visiting.