Finding a Dental Implant Dentist

No one wants to have a smile that is missing teeth—it can be pretty embarrassing. Frankly, it can also be pretty inconvenient as well, causing problems with chewing and eating. However, countless people suffer from tooth loss, due to disease, injury, or even daily wear and tear on the tooth. This is where getting dental implants comes in. Dental implants can fix this problem, restoring a person’s smile to the way it was before the tooth loss—no missing teeth, with a completely natural look.

Dental implants give a person the look of real teeth along with the function of real teeth. An implant is actually a titanium post that is drilled into a person’s jawbone and then topped with a very real-looking replacement tooth. Implants blend with a person’s real teeth to seem totally normal, and they are secure and durable—if, that is, the procedure is done by a highly-qualified dental implant dentist.

Any licensed dentist can do an implant procedure. That is, any person who has graduated from dental school and been granted his license to practice dentistry can place and restore dental implants. However, most people aren’t going to want someone fresh out of dental school to do such an important procedure. Similarly, most people wouldn’t want an inexperienced dentist—someone who has never done an implant procedure before—to work on their implants.

Therefore, it is important to do a little research to find dental implant dentists, among whom you can select to do your procedure.

To find a dental implant dentist, start the search with our Find a Dentist tool. All you need to do is type in your location. Choose “dental implant dentist” from the menu, and click submit. The search tool will generate a list of all of the dentists in your area that fit that description. The number of dentists on the list will depend upon the size of the city in which you live. If you live in a very small city, you may need to try looking in a neighboring larger town.

You will need to research each name on the list. This is because the search tool lists dentists by location, not by experience or by qualifications. So, you will need to find out this information in order to find the dental implant dentist that is best for you. You can look at the profile page for each dentist, call the office of each dentist, or call the State Licensing Board to find out information about the abilities and qualifications of each dentist.

You will also want to choose a dentist who specializes in implant dentistry, not one who also does other types of dentistry. There are also some groups that certify dentists in the use of dental implants. Check to see if any of the dentists are certified by any of these groups:

• American Academy of Implant Dentistry (AAID)
• American Academy of Implant Prosthodontics (AAIP)
• American Board of Prosthodontics (ABP)
• American College of Prosthodontics (ACP)
• American Board of Oral Implantology/Implant Dentistry (ABOI/ID)
• Misch International Implant Institute (MIII)
• International College of Oral Implantologists (ICOI)