Dental Implants
Bone Grafting for Dental Implants: Types and Recovery
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…
Read MoreCrown Lengthening: When and Why You Need It
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…
Read MoreReceding Gums Treatment Options: A Periodontist’s Guide
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…
Read MoreOsseous Surgery (Flap Surgery): What to Expect
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…
Read MorePeriodontal Maintenance vs Regular Cleaning: What’s Different
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…
Read MorePeriodontist vs Dentist: When Do You Need a Specialist?
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…
Read MoreStages of Periodontal Disease: From Gingivitis to Advanced
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…
Read MoreFrenectomy: A Simple Procedure That Makes a Big Difference
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…
Read MoreAll-on-4 Dental Implants: The Complete Guide
If you are facing the loss of most or all of your teeth in an arch, the choice between conventional dentures and a fixed implant solution is one of the most consequential dental decisions you will make. All-on-4 dental implants have emerged over the past two decades as the predictable, evidence-based answer for full-arch rehabilitation.…
Read MoreAll-on-4 Failure Rate: What the Research Really Shows
Patients researching All-on-4 inevitably land on horror-story forums, defensive marketing pages, and a wide spread of failure-rate numbers that range from “almost never fails” to “thousands of patients have problems.” The truth lives in the peer-reviewed literature, where two decades of long-term data make a more useful conversation possible. This guide walks through what the…
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