Kim Caldwell: Hi I’m here today with Dr. Andrew Mueller, an oral surgeon from the Doctors Implants our topic today is to talk about full arch dental implants. Dr. Miller I understand that the Doctors Implants specializes in full arch dental implants, is that right?
Dr. Mueller: Yeah, Full Arch Dental Implants is something that we do pretty much every day for people who are missing or need replacement of all their teeth. And so we remove the teeth, place dental implants and they will actually come in in the morning and leave that afternoon with a brand new beautiful smile.
Kim Caldwell: So there’s a couple different options that are available to to them if they want to replace their entire arch. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Dr. Mueller: Sure. So when somebody is at the point where either they’re already missing all of their teeth or they need to have whatever they have left is not working for them anymore, they need to have their teeth removed. They really kind of have three options. It’s a lot more than that maybe three broad categories of options. We got some models here that we could look at. You know this is what we’ve done for a long time which is a traditional denture. And it literally is a piece of plastic with plastic teeth and it’s big and it rests against your tissue and it moves and for the vast majority of patients it’s something that they really struggle to get used to. They struggle to eat a normal diet with it and the vast majority of patients pretty frustrated with this option. And so that’s why we’ve always wanted a better option and now with dental implants we do. So the second and third option both involve dental implants, It’s just how we use them. So we’re going to replace all the teeth, we’re going to use the dental implants as anchors and we could either anchor that’s like a denture onto the implant, so it still comes in and out of your mouth. Sometimes it’s called a snap in denture, snap-on denture. It’s still removable but the implants help hold it in place so it’s much more rigid and you can get very close to a normal diet with this. And patients are this is a dramatic improvement over a denture patients are really really happy with this. And then the third option which is definitely the thing that’s the most like our natural teeth, which is where we move into screwed in teeth. So again we’ll often place four implants in the bone and we have an entire bridge of teeth that’s now screwed into those implants. With this, anything you can eat with a natural dentition, you can eat with this. And it’s very very similar to a natural dentition. This is a just a dramatic improvement in the quality of life for these patients.
Kim Caldwell: Thanks for your time today. I’m sure that our audience will be able to learn a lot from it and make some great decisions about moving for with with dental implants.
