Dental Implant Placement
Clackamas, OR
 If you are reading this, you may be faced with making a decision about implants. You need as much information as possible. Clackamas Implant & Oral Surgery Center wants to give you information about why we think dental implant placement is so important. Let us give you information about how implants are placed, and how you can prepare your mouth for implant placement. We know that you can use this information to make a good decision on whether or not dental implants are right for you.
What are Dental Implants?
Dental practitioners created implants as a way to simulate normal teeth as much as possible, although they are prosthetic teeth. While dentures and implants are both forms of prosthetic teeth, dentures sit on top of your gums. Implants look the most like your regular teeth. They also help to keep your jawbone intact. When you lose teeth, you can lose parts of your jawbone. Your body decides that you don’t need those parts of your jawbone to support teeth that are no longer there. The body decides to remove slivers of your jaw, to use somewhere else. Dental implants are fixed into your jawbone, and a prosthetic tooth is placed on top of the abutment. The abutment acts like your tooth root and works to make your body believe you still have a tooth there. We can implant one tooth, several teeth, or an entire set of teeth using implants.
How Does the Dental Implant Procedure Work?
There are several steps in any implant procedure that we need to follow. We first need to check your oral health by checking your teeth and gums. Your gums need to be healthy to get dental implants. If we check and find gum disease, we will need to treat your gums for gum disease first, and then we can do implants after your gums have been treated.
If your gums appear healthy, we then need to look at the implant site. For a single tooth implant, we make an incision at the gumline where you had a tooth. We place an abutment through the incision into your jawbone. Then we place a crown - a prosthetic tooth - on top of the abutment that we placed in your jawbone. Your prosthetic tooth matches your existing teeth - so the only one that will know you have a missing tooth is you.
If you have several missing teeth, we will check your gums. We then make incisions along your gum line, and place dental abutments, or posts, into your gums. We affix all of those dental posts into your jawbone. In many cases, the number we place is equal to the number of teeth we need to replace. There are techniques that use fewer abutment posts and other dental implant materials. We can implant a bridge if you happen to be missing teeth all on one side. There are techniques, such as the All-on-4® Treatment Concept procedure, that use fewer posts. If you have questions about dental implants, give Clackamas Implant & Oral Surgery Center a call at (503) 652-8080. We would love to talk to you about whether or not dental implants are right for you and your mouth.
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