A smile as natural as her own…

Creating natural smiles is the key to long term success for many patients. When faced with the daunting prospect of having to lose teeth, the thought of having replacement teeth that could make you look like ‘someone you don’t recognise’ is a cause of anxiety for many patients. From my experiences, I have found that this is a concern for so many patients and is often overlooked.

I recently completed the treatment for this patient who was in her 40’s and was faced with the prospect of losing her front 6 teeth. She had already lost one tooth to periodontal disease and was wearing a removable denture because of this. This was already hampering her confidence because dentures don’t provide the full restoration of function and confidence in one’s smile. She knew her other 5 remaining front teeth were in poor health too however, she held on to these because the prospect of an even larger denture with 6 teeth was worse for her than simply holding on to ‘bad’ teeth. This is a feeling shared by many patients in a similar situation.

After a careful assessment we provided this patient with a solution to replace her teeth and not have to wear a removable denture again. Our solution was to replace the 6 teeth with 4 Straumann Dental Implants along with a bone graft and a gum graft. The bone and gum graft were very important to this treatment as it enables our team to restore the health of the supporting tissues as well as to recreate natural gum contours so that we do not need to rely on ‘pink porcelain’ to mimic ‘natural tooth shapes’.

We meticulously provided this treatment plan over a period of 6 months to ensure the foundations were built to last – long term results are achieved by undergoing a careful and patient approach to treatment and this is most important when providing dental implant treatment with bone and gum grafting. A temporary smile was provided to the patient during this whole time to ensure she could continue to live her life with minimal stress with regards to her smile.

The end result was one of a natural smile. A smile that she could feel comfortable with. We designed this smile by referring to the exisitng tooth shapes to ensure that we conformed to providing her with the best version of what could have easily been her own teeth. This is he ultimate test for restoring a smile – does it look like a smile that the patient naturally had or does it look like a dentist has created that smile? 

Thank you for reading

Dr Mohsin Patel