What actually happens at a full-arch consultation?

The room

It's about the size of a living room, with carpet and comfortable chairs. Quiet. No dental chair, no equipment, nobody in a white coat.

We want it to feel like sitting down for a talk. White coats and plaster models make people brace themselves before anyone has said a word, and then they stop listening.

Who you'll meet

Two roles, and it helps to know who does what.

The surgeon takes care of everything below the gumline: removing teeth, placing implants, the bone.

The restorative doctor takes care of everything above it: how your teeth look and feel, how you bite and how you speak.

Both matter. Surgery can go perfectly and still leave you with teeth you don't like.

Video consultations

Many of our consultations happen over video, and they work well.

If you've had an X-ray recently, ask for a copy and send it ahead. A panoramic X-ray or CT scan tells us a lot about your bone and how your teeth sit in it.

If you've worn a denture for a long time, planning from a distance is harder. An X-ray shows us whether there's enough bone height, but width is much harder to judge, and width matters.

What to bring

Your research. We're not the only voice worth hearing. Our patients talk about their own experiences in our patient community, and we don't moderate it. That tells you more than anything we could say about ourselves.

Your X-ray, if you have one.

Your questions. All of them, including the ones that feel silly. Nothing you ask will surprise us.

Your finances can wait. Some people arrive with it all arranged. Some have been saving for years, or waited until the kids finished college. Others have no idea yet and just want to know where they stand. Both are fine.

How we decide the details

We'll tell you what we expect. We won't promise an exact number of implants or exact positions from a scan.

A CT scan shows where the bone is. It can't reliably show whether that bone is strong enough, or whether a wall of bone will break when a tooth comes out. We find that out when we can see it during surgery, and that's when the best decision gets made.

So we walk you through the likely options ahead of time. Most likely we'll do this, and there's a smaller chance we'll do that instead. If the less likely one happens, it's something we already talked about, so it isn't a surprise.

The decision is yours

We'll tell you what we'd do for our own family, including anything that isn't good news.

Then it's up to you. Go elsewhere, get a second opinion, or do nothing at all. We'd rather you make a choice you feel sure about than one you were talked into. When you're ready to talk, we're here.

Your instructions, said out loud

You'll get your soft-diet instructions in writing, and we'll also go over them out loud, more than once. For ninety days you'll eat food softer than a hot dog, which covers a lot more than soup.

We say it out loud because anyone handed twenty-five pages signs them without reading. The things that matter most for your result get said as well as printed.

And they're printed properly on clean pages, never a smudged copy of a copy. If we tell you something is the most important instruction you'll get, the page should look like it.