Does anyone have any idea what hyperbaric oxygen treatment costs if you don't have insurance which will cover it? If I need it for dental work, I'm pretty sure my insurance won't cover that.

Nelie, my medical insurance paid, after some discussions with me, as it would have not been necessary without the radiation. I recall seeing weekly bills of thousands of dollars. Let this be a motivator to open discussion with your insuror. If you do have to self-insure, check with your state's insurance commissioner. Here, a large hospital was recently made to refund money to many, many uninsured patients who were charged much more than the insuance companies were for idential procedures. You should make sure you are getting the discounted rate. Good luck!

Note to Brian and Hacklene: I had five implants which fully integrated, due, I am sure, to the HBO treatments. The DMD/ENT who placed them told me he has been doing them for H&N patients for years with great success. There really was no worry that they would not work. It seems that with an experienced dentist and a course of HBO, the odds are very good.

Joanna, Thanks so much for sharing your experience with implants. It sounds like it is worth the effort. As soon as my insurance co approves the HBO treatments I'll be happy to post what the expense is here in Arizona. Thanks again for your support Hacklene

Thank you Joanna for bringing your perosnal expertise to the thread. I am glad to hear you are doing so well with yours. As in many things, the right planning and preparation, combined with experienced people, yield better than average results. Sounds like you have a great dental team. Perhaps you could email me their names and contact info as I would like to learn about their methods and implant brands they are using.

I have been off the board for a few days.

John,

Brian has certainly given you some very good information about wisdom teeth. I think he deserves an honorary dental degree with his responses about wisdom teeth, dentures and implants, etc.

Wisdom teeth can start to erupt at any age, however, the younger you are, the more likely it is that they will start erupting.

As far as your situation is concerned, without seeing the panorex, it is impossible to know whether your tooth would need to be extracted. Certainly, if the surgeon determines that the potential for future problems with leaving the tooth in, out way the risks of removing the tooth, you should get it out.

Good luck with your consult this week and let me know what the doc says.

Hi Amy,

As with any sevice performed, the charge for the service has to take many factors into consideration. As Brian mentioned, the cost of the implants themselves, are very high. When you take into account the fact that the bone drills are one time use items, overhead,additional supplies, sterilization costs, education costs, etc. the surgical phase of placing an implant runs quite high.

Making a crown for an implant is much higher than for a regular crown due to the precision parts that are used by the laboratory. My lab costs for an implant crown can run up to 3-5 times the cost of a crown on a tooth.

This past year I have started to fabricate all porcelain crowns in my office in one visit using the CEREC cad-cam system. This has halped me to cut down the cost of crowns for my patients as I can eliminate my lab bills. I just did my first one on an implant last week and it saved the patient over $300 dollars. However, bear in mind that the system cost me $98,000. That will take a long time to recoup.

Jerry
I hope this will help everyone appreciate why implant dentistry is so costly. However, if you can afford it, the results are far superior to dentures or bridges.

Dr. W - I thank you for the vote of confidence in my dental knowledge. It all comes from many years a lab tech and a chance to do may things myself. (In the service, there are only so many dentists to go around especially in remote areas). I have been around it for decades. When I came back from Nam they let me attend any school that I wanted, and dental prosthetics was very remote from the previous training that had me the first responder to sucking chest wounds and tensionpneumothorax with my finger stuck up to the hilt into someone's chest, or traumatic amputations and worse. My wife always jokes that if you are in a bad car accident, I'm the guy you want to have around with you...

While waiting for the next class in prosthetics to start, I chairside assisted in an oral surgery department for 8 months, and have also chairsided in some of the world's most boring things ( endo comes immediatly to mind). All the while doctors would patiently answer my incessant questions. Like why has that reamer started cutting a little ledge in the bend in the root canal and now you can't get it to go past that point and further into the root? ( As he pulls yet another reamer out and throws it across the operatory)

Dentistry has been good to me and over the years, I have been mentored by some of the best. I have lectured on implant prosthetics at more than 22 medical and dental schools, and hundreds of symposia. I am a contributing author to an implant text from WB Saunders, John Beumer at UCLA and I designed the UCLA abutment that revolutionized implant esthetics (and put my implant company's products on the map world wide), back in the day. I was the first technician asked to speak at an annual meeting of the American Academy of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. I have breathed enough porcelain dust to choke a horse fabricating thousands of crowns, and I have even sat as a chairside assistant, during friend's boards here in CA where, believe it or not, they still make you do a gold foil. I can pass gold foil with the best of them, though the need these days is obsolete. But I still look for all those lower class 5's on cuspids for new friends that are taking their boards. How ironic is it that someone who has spent his life in dentistry would end up as a poster boy for oral cancer and a foundation...

Thanks, Brian and Jerry for the "Implants are expensive because---" lesson. Maybe as the multitude of baby boomers begin to lose their teeth, newer,less expensive methods will be developed so that more people will have access to implants. Amy

It isn't so much a function of the cost of the parts, I don't see those coming down as the margins are not that great for manufacturer's now given the FDA compliance and regulatory issues that are part of their selling costs. So this is largely a doctor's fees issue, and with the escalating insurance costs to do business and other realities of practice, I also do not see relief in the future there. The only thing that could change the world of dental implants is 3rd party payment, which for the non cancer group isn't going to happen in the near future.

While we are on this subject, here's 1 more question. Can you give me 3 0r 4 criteria from which to judge which dentist you would choose to do 1 or more implants for you? There are so many offering them now-even in our little backwoods area. Amy

This is impossible to do. I would look for someone with a personal referral to a doctor in your area that actually has had them do implants on them. Doctor's skills at things which require manual dexterity and judgment, like a person in any other profession, vary widely. I would also get more than one opinion and estimate of costs, as that is also a very individual thing. I do have some distinct preferences as to implant brands and designs, and if you want to email me in a week when I am back in town we can talk about this. Most oral surgeons use more than one system, but for me I would want someone that is using one of a couple of very specific systems. This is all too technical to write a Trieste on the boards as to which systems and why, but I'll talk with you about it if you like.