Dental Implants

Many people feel that visits to the dentist can be (deservedly or not) nerve-wracking and scary. The idea of being able to sleep through dental procedures sounds like a dream come true. There is a growing trend of dentists advertising sleep dentistry for the above reasons. Indeed, sleep dentistry sounds even more attractive, because these sleep dentistry techniques don't make the patient unconscious (such as general anesthesia would), but instead place patients into a highly relaxed state, resulting in most cases of no memory of the procedure. This sounds like the perfect solution, right? Wrong! There are too many potentially life-threatening risks for general anesthesia to be used indiscriminately.

Dental Bone grafts are highly successful in extraction sites. I fill those sites with two types of materials consisting of specially treated donor and synthetic material that I have successfully been using for over three decades.

When I fill the hole left behind by the extracted root, surrounding bone cells use the graft in the following ways:

• The bone cells themselves are stimulated to make new bone (osteoconduction).
• Within the graft there are materials used by the bone cells as a scaffolding (like rebar) to populate the entire site (osteoinduction).
• Additionally, there are other materials that are used as food (substrate).

After placement of bone graft I seal it with a membrane. This keeps the gum cells out of the socket and lets the bone cells thrive (guided tissue regeneration).

The bone grafting technique described above works best in an intact extraction site. Badly infected teeth that have been left too long often destroy one or more walls of the tooth socket severely compromising the outcome of the described grafting.

I recently engaged in a fairly detailed Q&A session with a dental assistant located on the east coast who is considering sending her parents to my office here in Downey, Ca. She had very specific questions about my methods and my practice that used industry terminology, so this Q&A may be hard to follow to the casual reader. But anyone fairly well-versed in medical terminology should be able to follow it without problems. For those people I thought this Q&A might be helpful so I decided to post here on my blog for them to read.