Table of Contents:
- PART 1: Introduction
- PART 2: Guidelines for choosing a Dental Implants Expert
- PART 3: Understanding your surgeon’s training and experience
- PART 4: Assessing your Surgeon’s Aesthetic and Quality Standards with Dental Implants
- PART 5: Assessing your Surgeon’s Dexterous Skills and Coordination of Your Treatment
- PART 6: The Type of Facility and Anaesthetic
- PART 7: All-On-4 Costs and Type of Immediate Teeth
- PART 8: Complications with Dental Implants and Warranty Misconceptions
Be mindful that clinicians would often post pictures of their best cases. Therefore you should look very closely to critically assess what they post so as to ensure that their best aesthetic standards match with your own expectations. Not every person has an aesthetic eye, and this also extends to dentists. It’s an altogether separate skill to the surgery, and its important that both your and your dentist’s aesthetic standards are aligned.
If you are generally happy with what you are seeing in the pictures shown to you but don’t like some things such as the color of the teeth, you can always discuss this with the dentist and decide if you are happy with their answer as to how they would address the situation in your own case.
The general requirement in smile aesthetics is that the teeth must suit the face. The color can be changed, but size, protrusion, bulkiness, unevenness of the plane of the teeth, and asymmetries are all indications of the clinician’s aesthetic standards, or might also highlight limitations in their skills or abilities.
In these pictures you can see the teeth are too bulky, slanted and do not suit the face. Retreatment is not always possible, but in this case we managed to improve the aesthetics by changing the bridges.
Do not rely on Testimonials!
People who have All-On-4 dental implants sometimes come from a very troublesome dental history, poor dental condition, or are debilitated from wearing a denture. Sure implants would offer an improvement, but an improvement for them, and an improvement alone, does not necessarily mean an aesthetic result or an adequate surgery.
As problems may only become apparent down the track, you should ask to speak to patients who have had their All-On-4 teeth for at least 2-3 years. Meeting face-to-face with a patient who received this treatment may indeed be helpful to determine whether you agree that what was achieved for them was not merely an improvement but in actual fact an aesthetic result as you see it too. You can also get more of an insight into the patient’s experience and aftercare.
If the clinic sees a lot of All-On-4 cases, you will likely see such patients at any given time in the waiting room.
