All-on-4 Dental Implants

The All-on-4 procedure, especially here, has evolved. The original concept was to get patients who were in dentures out of them with the All-on-4 procedure. But what we've seen is our practice for the All-on-4 has materialized mostly from patients who are significantly dentally compromised where we take out the teeth, do some surgery, put some implants in, and then convert a denture to something that gets screwed down to the implants. So, day one, when we do our surgery, you never are without teeth. In reality, there are no differences between the All-on-4 implant and the conventional implant. It's the same implant. Whether I was doing a single crown, or whether I was doing the All-on-4, it's just a technique that's used. The implants in an All-on-4 are put in at angles that help us avoid things like the nerve that runs in your jaw or the sinuses that are in your upper jaw. So, by angling them, we can distribute the force a little bit better, and then not need to worry about grafting as much. The ideal patient for the All-on-4 is somebody whose dentition is starting to fail them or a patient who is in a denture and doesn't want to be in it anymore. Once you've decided that you want to proceed with the All-on-4, and we've decided that you're a candidate for it, meaning that you have enough bone. That we've done our due diligence with the CT scans, and evaluating bone quality, and bone quantity. You can look for the procedure for the All-on-4 to take about anywhere from five to seven months. The implants need a certain amount of time to heal, to fuse to the bone, and once they fuse to the bone, then we can take you out of your temporary restoration, which you've been in the whole time, and start fabricating a final restoration, but to get that done well takes time.