Dental Implants FAQ

These are the questions patients actually ask me in their first call. Every answer below is what I’d tell you across the desk — no marketing softening, no upsell scaffolding. If a number is uncertain, I say so. And where a question deserves its own deep dive, I point you to it, so this page stays a map rather than a wall. This FAQ is the quick-answer hub of our full guide to dental implants; if you’re starting from scratch, it’s worth two minutes on what a dental implant actually is first — the answers here assume you know the basic three-part anatomy.

The fast paths: what implants cost and what a full arch really costs; how much it hurts and the week-by-week timeline; whether you’re a candidate, including when you’ve been told you have too little bone; and the long view — how long implants last and the 2–5% that fail.

If you don’t see your question, the fastest answer is the consultation — 45 minutes with me, free of charge, with your own CBCT scan on the screen in front of us.

A lot of the answers below come back to three ideas, so it helps to say them once up front. First, what I mean by a successful implant: not just one that survives, but one wrapped in a band of hard keratinized gum that seals bacteria out, so the bone underneath never moves. I have patients more than ten years out with zero bone loss. That seal is the whole game, and it’s why I can stand behind a 10-year biological warranty on the biology, not just the parts.

Second, the bite. An implant has no ligament to cushion it like a natural tooth, so I rebalance your occlusion at maintenance visits — almost like rotating the tires on a car — to keep force straight down the implant instead of shaking it side to side. Third, the technology I use to make compromised cases work: my Vampire Implants™ Protocol pairs UV-activated titanium with platelet-rich plasma from your own blood, which is exactly what lets me treat the smokers and older patients other offices turn away. Keep those three in mind and the rest of the answers make sense.

Two answers below come up so often they have their own pages worth reading in full: the case for choosing an implant at all — every benefit over a bridge or denture, with the honest trade-offs — and the question of which kind you need, where I walk through single, full-arch, zirconia, and the rest. A few of the answers also lean on terms like osseointegration and peri-implantitis; those all live in the implant glossary if a word trips you up.