Dental Implants
Who wants them? Who needs them?
Who wants dental implants? No one. Who needs them? Sometimes any one who has anywhere from one missing tooth to 32 missing teeth.

Goals of modern dentistry
Our goal of modern dentistry is to return our patients to oral health. We must do this in the most predictable fashion. Everything we do with and for our patients must have this in mind no matter how many teeth are remaining or how many teeth are missing.

What is a dental implant? A dental implant is simply a replacement for a tooth root. The primary function of an implant is to act as an abutment for a prosthesis or support to something similar to a tooth. We are not sharks that can replace missing teeth throughout their lifetime. SO implants allows your dentist to use the implants to support missing teeth whether its one, two, three, ten, or 30. Implants are titanium root forms that are place into you jaws basically the same place your tooth used to be. The implant will fix it self to your living bone in a process that is called osseointegration. The use of dental implants to treat complete and partial edentulism has become an integral part of our ability to restore our patients to as natural and predictable situation as possible.
Implant survival rate have been reported any where from 96% to 99%. No report has ever stated the loss of adjacent teeth. The rarely failed implant can almost always be retreated keeping the adjacent natural teeth healthy and untouched.

Let me tell you a story about from 1978. I had just graduated dental school and like I said, I was at the beginning of my continuing education career. My brother John who was in college at the time, called and said that he had one of his front teeth “knocked out” in soccer game. The tooth was long gone and was going to come right down to have me fix it. John had a beautiful smile. He never had a cavity in his life. So as I was trying to figure out what to do I had to think? I knew I did not want to make him a removable partial denture, which is a plastic tooth, attached to metal and plastic that John would have to take in and out forever. I knew I didn’t want to take my drill and shape his front teeth for a non-removable bridge because even though I knew I wasn’t experienced enough to do a fabulous work that would endure the test of time, I knew in my heart it would have been a shame to damage two perfectly good teeth. Thank God I knew this as in experienced as I was. I did refer John to a periodontist whom I had met previously. He placed a dental implant where the tooth was missing from. I later placed a crown on the implant. It came fabulous. That was 1978 and as of today August 2012, John’s smile is perfect. The implant and crown are just as healthy as the day they were finished.
When do you think the first dental implant was placed?
Answer: 1952
I attended the Misch Surgical Institute and achieved Fellowship status in the International Congress of Oral Implantology.
Dr Stephen Matarazzo