Today is a great day for a few of us.

We are starting treatment for a patient that has had medical issues that have made it difficult for him to keep his teeth in good shape and, alas, we’ve come to the conclusion that it was time to remove his teeth and restore them with dental implants.

What is “Teeth in a Day”?

The phrase ‘Teeth in a Day’ refers to the process of placing Dental Implants and then immediately placing the teeth with some kind of dental prosthetic, usually an Overdenture.

An overdenture is a smaller denture that snaps onto either natural teeth, or most commonly dental implants.

The overdenture doesn’t have to be as large as a regular denture since it is supported and held in place by the implants. Other great benefits include having the overdenture cover and protect the surgical sites to help them heal better, improved esthetics and never having to be without teeth.

How it works:

We spend a lot of time coordinating with the surgeon, the lab and the patient before hand with many different kinds of high tech and hands-on data gathering to make the day go very smoothly.

A surgeon will remove the remaining teeth and place the implants in predetermined spots. These sites are jointly chosen by me and the surgeon using special imaging techniques like a Cone Beam CT Scan. Sometimes we will have our lab make a surgical stent that will have channels built-in to precisely guide the placement of the implants to coincide with an overdenture using CAD CAM (computer-aided-design and computer-aided-manufacturing) technologies.

Once the implants are placed we will usually place bone-grafting material to help the body maximize the bone quality and quantity.

The more common way to fit the overdenture to the implants and the patient’s mouth is to take an impression after the bone-grafting and send it out to the lab. The impression will have metal pieces in them that will let the lab know exactly where the implants are and how they are oriented. They will use models and measurements we gave them to custom-make the outer shell of the overdenture.  The lab will then retrofit them into the overdenture and return them to our office later on in the day and we screw them onto the implants.

After checking the fit and the bite the patient is all set to go and use their new teeth and smile.

After the implants are fully accepted by the body which could be 4-6 months we can then make a more precise and stealthy prosthesis. This may be either an overdenture or a more traditional bridge once we know exactly what the gum contours are after all of the healing.

The good news for our patient this week is that he has great bone and never really had any periodontal disease so we can hope for optimal gum contours that will give us the most natural results. We’re expecting that he will be able to eat, smile and talk with the fullest confidence, and, hey, never worry about getting a cavity ever again.

It’s a great option that more and more people are taking advantage of these days.
