What Is a Dental Implant?

If you need to replace a missing tooth, you may need a dental implant. Watch the video below as Dr. David P. Ney defines what dental implants are and identifies the differences between conventional dental implants and mini dental implants.

So there’s actually two forms of actual implants. You have a smaller diameter implant, which just means it’s smaller in the shape of it, or you have a conventional implant which is a little bit larger. The way those go into the bone are going to be two different situations.

Individuals who, for instance, have lost teeth or have had teeth extracted will typically have less ridge or less bone to put an implant into. For a typical conventional implant, you’re going to have to have a certain amount of dimension to put that implant in. That dimension, what happens is, they’ve got to take away tissue to expose the actual bone. Then they place the implant into a big hole in which they have actually placed, then the implant is placed, the bone heals back to the implant.

Huge difference between the actual mini implant, which is a smaller diameter. Once again, you don’t need as wide a bone as you do for a conventional, and it’s like screwing a screw into, actually, wood. You’re screwing the implant into the bone as-is.

The great thing about the mini implant, it’s got this little osseous surface on the implant, which basically stimulates bone growth. I like to let the implants heal two to probably three months to let those things kind of integrate in the bone—integration, meaning, become part of the bone. As opposed to conventionals, you’re looking at about a six-month process. You’re looking at a little more healing time, certainly. And then, what happens when they recover it? They have to take that tissue away (one more thing they have to do), and then they have to take a little torque wrench, if you will, to make sure that everything is actually stabilized. If it’s not stabilized, they have to take it out and they have to put bone in and they have to heal it again.

So, we have limited areas where we can place, so we always place at least six, possibly eight to begin with and we try to place four to five down on the bottom. So as we go, as I call it upstairs (but really in the maxilla), it’s going to be a softer bone, and so it will require a little more implants. And sometimes, those implants won’t integrate, and they won’t integrate for a variety of actual reasons. We don’t know what the actual reasons are, quite a bit.

So what you do is you take that out. But when you take it out, there’s a small hole there as opposed to the conventional implant where you have to put a whole lot of bone into it. All we do is move the implant over maybe 2 mm. Two mm to a lot of people doesn’t mean a lot. It’s a very small amount of actual movement. Place another hole, place another implant, and allow it to heal. Again, I always allow things to heal first to make sure that they’re going to be a successful situation for us.

If you have a situation where a lot of people do, if they’re wearing a lower denture, for instance, and you’re frustrated for obvious reasons, we call those in our industry floating dentures, because they float. I will not make a lower denture without having implants in. The implants are going to stabilize those things. We also use the soft tissue, meaning the bone that’s in the back, to also support that lower denture as well, and the upper denture.

So if you have missing teeth, if you’re frustrated with how you chew, if your dentures are loose, we would encourage you very much to give us a call and come in for a free consultation in which we will take a special X-ray, which will show us the sides of your bone. Not just the front of your bone, but how much bone do you really have and whether or not we can do something with that. And we can give you options financially and or model-wise as to where you want to go.