Hi, I’m Dr. Antolak at thegentledentist.com. We’re in Shebly Township, Michigan, (586) 247-3500 is our phone number. What I’d like to do is talk to you a little bit about dental implants. Dental implants are an unbelievable way of preserving teeth, securing dentures, and a great way to help to give you something that you lost, namely your teeth.

I’ve been personally placing dental implants for about the last nine or ten years. Dental implants are something I knew at that point in time something that was really valuable. Patients needed to have exposure to using them, and implementing them.

So, what we did was place dental implants and restored them with crowns. We replace teeth that have been missing, lost, and if root canal teeth have failed. We take the tooth out, and put in a dental implant.

Within the last few years, mini implants have really been taken on strong. As you can see, the picture I have here, you can see the difference in the size of a traditional implant, which is on the right hand side. And then, on the left hand side, a couple of smaller size implants; those are called mini-implants.

Basically the definition of a mini-implant is three millimeters in diameter or smaller, and a standard implant is greater than three millimeters. So, you see on your left hand side, it is about five millimeters in diameter. The other two that you see, are three millimeters in diameter. You’ll notice that the tops of the ones that are three millimeters in diameter have a different attachment. So those can go into the jawbone.

Depending on the case and the situation, dentures are made to have little snaps that go inside the dentures, and they snap over the top of either one of those two mini-implants.

The benefit of the mini implant is that it’s more conservative. In other words, for patients who can’t afford the full size dental implant, or if they have more medical issues where they can’t actually go through more advanced surgeries, the mini implant is a great alternative.

By having the mini-implant, it keeps lower dentures down secure into the jaw bone. It keeps it secure over the ridge so that the teeth don’t move around. One of the biggest problems with lower dentures especially is that they move around a lot.

You can never bite down predictably with a full denture. So these mini implants being there allow you to bite down with confidence. You’re going be able to bite down a lot harder and therefore chew the foods you want to chew, not the foods you actually have to eat like the soft foods or the mushy foods. We can also do the same thing and put them on the upper dentures too, so either way they work great.

If you’re interested in having some kind of an implant to either help support your denture or missing tooth, please give us a call. Our phone # is (586) 247-3500 and our website is thegentledentist.com. Thank you, and have a blessed day.