Dental Implant Placement
Dental implants are the most exciting development in dentistry in the last 50 years. If you have lost or are losing one or more teeth, you don’t have to live without teeth, and you won’t have to rely on uncomfortable and unattractive dentures.
Dental implants are replacement teeth that look like natural teeth, function like natural teeth, and only require the same care as natural teeth. Best of all, almost everyone is a candidate, dental implants can last a lifetime, and they have a very high success rate, especially when placed by a specialist.
Bone Graft
One of the few reasons why you might not be able to get dental implants is if you don’t have enough bone to support the implant. That’s when a bone graft is used. Bone grafts allow us to supplement the amount of bone in your jaw, giving you a foundation for replacement teeth.
Even if you have enough bone to support implants, we might do what is known as a socket preservation graft. Since the dental implant is narrower than your tooth, there is space around the implant. A socket preservation graft fills in this space and helps maintain the jawbone so you get great-looking and long-lasting results.
Periodontal Oral Surgery
Periodontal oral surgery is used when your gum disease threatens your teeth. In gum disease, oral bacteria have damaged the gum tissue around your teeth, forming deep pockets that shelter bacteria. As these pockets deepen, oral bacteria attack the ligaments and bones supporting your teeth. Worse, once the body detects the seriousness of the infection, it can initiate a dangerously drastic response that also destroys bones and ligaments.
The goals of periodontal oral surgery are to eliminate infection, reattach your gums to your teeth at a higher, healthier level, and save your teeth. We will open up the pockets, clean out the bacteria, and reattach the gums to your teeth.
Gum Graft
If gum disease or other causes of receding gums mean that you don’t have enough gum disease to properly cover your teeth anymore, we can use gum tissue from elsewhere to help restore your gums to a healthy position.
Sometimes, gum tissue can be taken from a neighboring area and simply rotated over to help cover your tooth or teeth. Other times, we will have to get gum tissue from a donor site in your mouth. Gum tissue taken from the donor area might be full thickness or it might just be connective tissue taken from the middle. But no matter the source of the graft, once it is in place, it will attach to your gums and teeth and restore your gums to their healthy appearance.
Wisdom Teeth Extraction
Wisdom teeth are vestiges of a time when our ancestors chewed so much that their jaws grew larger and their teeth wore out young. This created space for a needed third molar, which grew in at young adulthood to help people keep chewing to the ripe old age of 35 or, if they were lucky, 50.
Today, wisdom teeth are commonly a source of problems. They can cause crowding as they try to fit in a jaw that is too small for them. They can also impact other teeth and fail to emerge properly. Even if they do emerge properly, they can be hard to keep clean, and cause gum disease or become infected. For all these reasons, many people opt to remove wisdom teeth early before they cause problems.
Are you in need of oral surgery in Rochester, NY? Please call (585) 244-3337 or email us today for an appointment with our dentists at Contemporary Dentistry.
