Memorable moment of the week – Multi-disciplinary care to achieve optimum results

This patient attended our clinic 2 years ago, for the first time. He is a young man, in his 30’s, and had never had the confidence in his  smile. As can be seen by the picture below, he had dental crowding, malocclusion, missing teeth and dental infections.

Due to the problems associated with his teeth, he was unable to chew comfortably and his confidence with his smile was affected. When planning a treatment case like this we must consider incorporating a multi-disciplinary approach to the care plan. This is because it is not possible to provide a good long term outcome by not addressing all of the problems. For instance, simply replacing the missing teeth will not address the crowding problem. Also, by replacing the missing teeth without straightening the teeth, you can leave the patient with having no option to straighten his teeth in the future.

Each treatment option will influence the ability to provide any further treatment in the future. For this reason, everything must be considered from the beginning.

For this reason, we provided restorative dentistry, orthodontics and Implant treatment to provide this patient with the optimum long term outcome. The restorative treatment helped treat the ongoing dental pathology and enabled us to protect and save the remaining natural teeth. This is crucial and must be performed first because delaying this can result in further tooth loss.

Following this the teeth were straightened using Invisalign orthodontics. This enabled us to re-position our patient’s teeth into a uniform arch. This also opened up the missing tooth spaces so that symmetrical replacement teeth could be designed to fit into these spaces.

The treatment was then completed by providing dental implants to replace the missing teeth in a manner that perfectly matches the patient’s own natural teeth. During this process, we improved the appearance of the patient’s own teeth by providing teeth whitening and composite re-contouring.

At the final stage of this treatment plan, i could sense so much joy and happiness in the patient. The most memorable moment for me was when the patient left the surgery. I was looking out of the window  onto the front of the building. I noticed that our patient had walked out and he had the biggest smile on his face that I had ever seen from him. This was the look of a man that felt great! Maybe it was his new smile? Maybe it was something else? All I know is that it was wonderful to see this!

Thank you for reading,

Mohsin Patel BDS MJDF RCS (Eng)