Developing Your Implant Team

As general dentists, when we think about developing our implant team and with some training, we can get comfortable with all aspects of this. If only one person has to visualize the case all the way through, it makes a little bit easier. We are going to start with our usual data, our photos and all the things that we would do to do our occlusal analysis. We should add a CBCT to this process and begin to figure out where the tooth or the teeth will be in space, so we can start our reverse engineering process.

Utilize a surgical guide and set your team.

We are always going to recommend that we include in that plan a surgical guide that will get both depth and direction of implant placement. With that in mind, if you are developing a team approach where you are working with periodontist or a surgeon, whoever is touching the case last, which is going to be the restorative dentist, should be the one that is there first. They have to be the one to visualize in space where that tooth is going to go. Then with your team members, which is going to be the lab technician, your surgeon or periodontist, you can decide the depth and the direction of the implant.

Visualize the placement on the bone.

Sometimes the bone is not always exactly where you want it, so the surgeon is going to want the implant centered in bone. You may have to start thinking about the selection of what sort of abutment are you going to use. Are you going to be able to do something screw retained or cement retained? The other thing we have to think about is sometimes there is not enough bone there at all, which may lead to discussions of what sort of grafting you are going to do.

Be involved and develop your skills.

I think you will find that implant dentistry is the fastest-growing sector of what we is restorative dentist. I think it is critical that we are involved with this at a very high level in our practices. As you go down this road, well, I encourage you to do all prosths maybe get some surgical training so that you can pick and choose the ones that you want to do and then spend some time developing that team. And I think if you do, you will have a lot of fun doing these procedures.