How long does cosmetic dentistry take? – Dr. Matiasevich – Santa Cruz Dentist

How long does cosmetic dentistry take?

Bob: There’s lots of ways to speed dentistry up today and that really just comes down…that’s always presented to the patient. Whenever we do a treatment plan, if it’s something real simple, like maybe it’s just one tooth, one of the things we value about our practice and how efficient we are able to do things, is a lot of times we will be able to do that treatment for them that day when they come in.

We strive very hard to be able to do that. Because a lot of times something just comes up. That happens a lot with existing patients, they’re patients of ours, or someone calling, cold calling, from the phone book. “Yeah, I just broke my tooth” or “My son Johnny fell and broke and his front tooth can you get him in, can you get him fixed?” And we pretty much will do just about anything to get them fixed that day to get them happy.

But as far as larger treatment plans, things like that, there are ways to speed up the treatment and so that’s generally presented to the patient. A lot of times we can do a lot of our dentistry in one appointment. When we talk about implants, implant dentistry, and people who are wearing dentures and maybe want to upgrade and have implants placed, and no longer have implants, we do offer things like teeth in an hour, teeth in a day. These sorts of ways where you can come in and get it all done in one day. Now that’s actually the treatment, okay. So one of things is that, don’t want it to be false advertising or anything, there are steps that we have to do to have everything ready. So there’s maybe some diagnostic steps but the actual treatment when you think of “Oh, I’m going to sit in the chair he’s actually going to work on me,” That can be done generally in one day in a lot of procedures or the minimum two, so…which is really really good for people especially if they have busy schedules or if they just want to have it done.

I have a patient who came in a couple weeks ago, David, and he wanted to have his front teeth he actually big guy, jeeze, he must have been like 6 foot five, 280 pounds, just a giant. He comes in, smiles, says his mom sent him in because his moms my patient she’s a real sweet little lady. She’s about this big and he came in because he’s missing all his front teeth.

He said “Doc, can you fix my front teeth?” Meanwhile he’s missing all of his back teeth. I said “Yeah, you want to get the back?” He said, “No I just want to get these front teeth fixed.”

I said “All right.” So we sat down and we were able to repair his teeth and give him new teeth in 2 appointments and he was just ecstatic he thought it was the greatest thing. It looked so awesome. Well, about a week went by, and in walks Dave with his mother and they go, “We want to talk to you.”

And I’m like, “Oh okay what?”

And Dave sits down and goes, “I wanted you to know that these are the best teeth ever and my mom says that I have to get my back teeth done and I think I should get my back teeth done because, you know what? I’ve got a girlfriend now, and it’s all because of you Dr. Bob. You got me a woman. I have a woman, she’s great, she likes me. I can smile at her. I don’t feel afraid anymore and I’m happy.”

So it’s like “Okay, great.”

So we started talking about getting back teeth and he’s like, “Well how fast can you do it?” So then we’re like well all right, let’s do it.

The women that come in our office, especially the ones that have had bad experiences in the past and are really fearful, just getting them through that and getting them their teeth allows them to kind of start their life over, and just gives them more self esteem. A lot of times, their self esteem is really damaged but I’ve noticed with the men, even though they don’t show it, they’re self esteem is really down.

We had a patient that came in, Dewey, a couple years ago, and he came in and he hadn’t been to the dentist in like 34 years, and he came in and all of his teeth were just really badly damaged. And one of things that he told us was that his dating life was terrible and everything. We’re like, “Okay, we can improve that probably by fixing your teeth,” And sure enough, we fixed his teeth and he comes in and he’s smiling to the girls, he’s bringing them flowers every time he comes in to get his teeth cleaned, and he’s just like overwhelmed because that was actually his chief complaint. I think he probably could have kept going with his life the way it was with bad teeth because they weren’t hurting him, they weren’t really bothering him. He was still able to eat his food, but the big thing was he couldn’t go out, and make a connection with the opposite sex, and once he was able to get his teeth done, wow. I mean, he was just beaming. He shaved his beard, his mustache, cut his hair and I was like “Who is this guy?”