Experience vs. Convenience in Indianapolis Dental Implant Procedures
Experience vs. Convenience in Indianapolis Dental Implant Procedures
If you’ve suffered the loss of one, several or all of your teeth and have decided that dental implants are your best treatment option, your next project will be to find the best dental professional to handle your dental restoration. In Indianapolis, dental implants are offered by a range of providers, including general dentists, periodontists, oral surgeons and corporate dental chains that may use any combination of these professionals to provide a “one stop shopping” experience to patients. As you evaluate these options, it’s important to know that choosing your provider is one of the most important decisions you’ll make throughout the dental implant process, and experience matters much more than convenience as you make that choice.
Dental implants are, without question, the best method of dental restoration available today. With dental implants, dental health professionals are able to offer their patients a solution to missing teeth that looks, feels and functions much like their own, natural teeth once did. While that solution was once limited to a relatively small pool of ideal patients, new surgical techniques and materials developed over recent years have made dental implant restoration much more widely available. Today, most anyone who has lost teeth is a candidate for dental implants, and since they address many of the shortcomings of dental bridges or dentures, they have become the standard of care for the treatment of tooth loss.
NO SUBSTITUTE FOR EXPERIENCED DENTAL IMPLANT SURGEONS
As the use of dental implants has grown, so too has the number of providers offering implant-based restorations. While the surgical placement of implants in the jawbone was once done only by oral and maxillofacial surgeons, today you’ll see advertisements for Indianapolis dental implants everywhere, the procedures being done by a general dentists, periodontists and, more recently, corporate dental chains, which appeal to potential customers by advertising a convenient and economical one-stop-shopping approach to dental implant restoration.
In today’s busy world, convenience can certainly be a big selling point, but as many patients have discovered, a great sales pitch doesn’t necessarily mean great treatment. Having your implants placed by a highly-trained and experienced oral and maxillofacial surgeon, while possibly less convenient than using the dentist or periodontist around the corner or the corporate clinic at the local shopping mall, is the best way to go if exceptional, complication-free results are your goal. Despite the prolific marketing campaigns that tend to portray implant restoration as a simple, routine dental procedure, implant placement is surgery, which, of course, is the specialty of oral and maxillofacial surgeons.
While there are many well-trained and talented periodontists and general dentists out there who do a great job with implants, qualifications vary significantly from those of an oral surgeon, as well as from one dentist to another. Using an oral surgeon gives patients the assurance of knowing that their Indianapolis dental implants provider has at undergone at least four years of intensive, hands-on training in a hospital-based surgical residency program, mastering surgical techniques that a general dentist may only have studied for a few hours in a weekend continuing education course.
Additionally, using a surgeon with years of private practice experience is generally a better option than corporate dental centers, even if they have oral surgeons on staff. That’s because those centers tend to appeal to dental professionals who are just beginning their careers and have little day-to-day experience, and employee turnover is often high. While you might get lucky and get a great surgeon, why take the risk when you can choose an oral surgeon with a proven track record of successful and beautiful results with Indianapolis dental implants?