I’d like to show you a case of a young boy who came to the White Clinic^® for the very first time, a few weeks ago. He flew in from Toronto and had been recommended by a mutual friend complaining of a front tooth that was “feeling weird”.

Following a brief diagnosis and a CBCT (Cone Beam Computerized Tomography), we found out that he had a very rare condition called Internal Root Resorption, and as a result he was destined to lose his front tooth. And here entered the emotional issue of how to deal with losing your front tooth.I can only imagine what this must feel like, to be 18 years old, facing all the challenges in life and also now having to lose your smile.

It’s a huge responsibility as a Dental Surgeon, to make sure that this chap actually has a good experience and a positive outcome, because if I was to do something wrong, his whole life would be affected by this!Of course it made things difficult that he lived in Toronto, meaning that the solution that I gave him would have to be not only cosmetically good, but would have to work. If something went wrong he wouldn’t be able to fly back on a regular basis, because it was very far away.

In the surgery, I performed something called Partial Extraction Technique or Socket Shield, where I left some of the root of the tooth inside and placed an implant and an immediate crown. In this case I used his own tooth, which I fused to the adjacent teeth. The whole procedure took me under 1 hour, and I followed the gold standard rules of guided bone regeneration and soft tissue management to ensure that this young man will have a good healing process.

We called him a few days ago and everything seems to be going fine. He’ll be back in December to change his temporary tooth for a definitive one and hopefully his experience in complex oral rehabilitation will be a great one and we would have done something that we love to call Life-Changing Dentistry!

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*The patients consented to have their pictures published to illustrate each clinical case.

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