Oral surgery can help tackle issues too severe to be treated with general and restorative dental care. Our team can offer these solutions, from tooth extraction to dental implant placement. In today’s blog, your Newport Beach, CA, dentist is talking about our approach to oral surgery, and how we use these procedures to help improve your oral health!
Planning Treatment
To begin oral surgery, we will need to take a close look at your smile. With digital x-rays and intraoral cameras, our team can take a close look at your smile to identify the cause and severity of your oral health concerns, allowing us to plan treatment in detail. Our team can examine smiles that have sustained injuries, require tooth extraction, or have gaps due to tooth loss. We can also rebuild weakened jawbones too!
Keeping Patients Comfortable
We want to ensure your oral surgery is a comfortable one, even if you have dental anxiety. Which is why in addition to a local anesthetic, our team can provide dental sedation to help you enter a calm and relaxed state, with little to no memory of the procedure at all. Nitrous oxide is administered with a mask over the nose. The patient inhales the gas and reaches a calm state, while staying conscious the entire time. The effects wear off quickly. Oral sedation is taken in pill or liquid form before the procedure begins and offers a deeper state of clam. You’re still conscious, but have no memory of the process. The effects take time to wear off. The deepest form is IV sedation, and again takes time to wear off. A trained anesthesiologist will be on hand to monitor you. The option we recommend will depend on your age, weight, anxiety levels, medical history, and the extensiveness of the surgery we are conducting.
Wisdom Tooth Extraction
When people reach their late teens and early 20s, up to four new teeth could erupt in the rear of the mouth. Known as wisdom teeth, these additional molars could cause misalignment, injury to the teeth, infection, and misalignment. But to safeguard smiles, our team could employ oral surgery to gently extract them before they erupt, safeguarding the health, function, and beauty of your smile. We may need to remove one or two, or possibly all four. The extraction process could take as little as 30 minutes, and most people return to normal activities after a day or two of rest. We could also extract teeth to aid in orthodontic treatment, improve bite balance and ease strain, or to prevent seriously injured or decayed/infected teeth from threatening the overall stability of your smile.
Bone Grafting and Sinus Lifts
When we lose our teeth, the body will stop sending calcium and phosphorus to the jawbone around the missing teeth. Without these nutrients, the bone tissue breaks down. Your jaw loses mass and density, which means further tooth loss and an aged appearance. This could also mean you don’t have enough structure to support dental implants. However, we could use oral surgery to rebuild the weakened areas with grafting and sinus lifts. For the lower jaw, we add new bone structure to the jaw, taken from your hip, knee, or the rear of your jaw, or from synthetic sources. For the upper jaw, we could raise the sinus floor to uncover new structures that can support dental implants. Once the implants are in place, your jaw retains its strength and durability.
Dental Implant Placement
When you lose a tooth, or possibly several or all of them, we can help rebuild your smile with dental implants. This involves inserting a titanium post that acts as a new root. This bonds with the jaw and allows your new tooth to last for decades to come. For an individual one, we attach an abutment and crown to complete your new tooth. But we also use multiple posts to support a bridge or even a fixed set of dentures. You can enjoy a complete smile, one that looks and functions like natural ones!
If you have any questions about how our team treats serious oral health issues with oral surgery, or if you have a specific concern that needs attention, then please reach out to our team today to see if you need oral surgery.
Talk to Your Newport Beach, CA, Dental Team
If you are interested in oral surgery to transform your smile, please contact your Newport Beach, CA dentist’s office at (949) 630-0143. Our team wants to help you maintain your best smile and optimal oral health for years to come, and we have experience helping patients of all ages too!
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