Dental Implants

When patients research treatment for receding gums, two approaches dominate the conversation. The Pinhole Surgical Technique (PST), developed and trademarked by Dr. John Chao, has been marketed aggressively as a minimally invasive alternative to traditional grafting. Connective tissue grafting (the gold standard surgical approach) has decades of published outcomes data behind it. Both have legitimate…

If a periodontist has recommended a gum graft, you probably want two things: a clear picture of which graft technique is being proposed for your situation and a realistic week-by-week sense of what recovery actually looks like. The internet tends to deliver one of two extremes. Some sources make grafting sound trivial, and others make…

For roughly one in three implant candidates, the conversation about implants starts with a separate conversation about bone. Years of missing teeth, periodontal disease, or trauma can leave the jaw without enough volume or density to anchor an implant securely, and bone grafting is the procedure that rebuilds that foundation. The good news is that…

Crown lengthening sits in an interesting middle ground in periodontics. Half the patients arrive because their general dentist cannot place a crown without exposing more tooth structure, and the other half arrive because they want to address a “gummy smile” where too much gum tissue shows when they smile. Both scenarios involve the same core…

Patients who notice their teeth looking longer often arrive in our office assuming the only fix is surgery. That is sometimes true, but more often there is a ladder of treatment options that runs from very simple at-home changes through composite bonding and orthodontic correction up to surgical grafting for the most severe cases. The…

If your periodontist has recommended osseous surgery, the conversation usually arrives after years of gum disease, deepening pockets, and a clear pattern of bone loss that scaling and antibiotics have not stopped. Osseous surgery, also called flap surgery, is the established surgical treatment for moderate-to-advanced periodontitis when the goal is to eliminate infected tissue, reshape…

Patients diagnosed with periodontitis are often told at the end of their initial therapy that future cleanings will be different. The schedule shifts from twice a year to every three or four months, the appointment runs longer, the insurance code changes, and the out-of-pocket cost frequently rises. None of this is optional. Periodontal maintenance is…

Most people see a general dentist twice a year for cleanings and routine care, and that visit covers the vast majority of what their mouth needs over a lifetime. But for a meaningful subset of conditions, the right provider is a periodontist: a dentist who has completed an additional three years of specialty training focused…

When a dental hygienist tells you that you have periodontitis, the first question worth asking is which stage. The answer changes almost everything that follows. The four stages of periodontal disease run from gingivitis (fully reversible) through advanced periodontitis (where the goal shifts to saving teeth that are already loose), and the treatment pathway, the…

A frenectomy is one of the smallest procedures in periodontics, but for the right patient it solves problems that have lingered for years. The frenum is the small band of tissue that connects the lip or tongue to the gums or floor of the mouth, and when one of these bands is too thick, too…