Two Mini Implants With Sinus Lift

Hi, I’m Dr. Todd Shatkin and welcome to this Monday Morning Minute. Today I want to talk about replacing a single molar with two mini implants. Now, there’s been a lot of articles all over the world discussing the use of two mini implants versus one conventional implants. And actually, there’s a lot of reasons why two mini implants can actually be better than one conventional implant. And some of these articles point out the fact that there’s less periimplantitis around the implants compared to conventional implant because of the small percutaneous opening and the limited amount of plaque and bacteria they can get around. That the fact that it’s a one piece design as opposed to a two piece with a connection.

There’s many, many reasons. The other thing is the mini implants, actually two mini implants will have equal or more surface area for bone adaptation than one conventional implant. There’s many, many articles pointing out one of the authors, Dennis Flanagan, you can look that up. He’s written a few articles about the subject. Of course, I’ve written some and other clinicians all over the country and the world have written those articles. So if you want a copy of some of those articles, feel free to contact us, be happy to send them to you.

The other thing I also want to mention is these are fully FDA approved for use in all areas of the mouth. These are the intralock MDL implants that are fully FDA approved for use for single teeth, multiple teeth, roundhouses bridges, dentures. It specifically says removable and fixed processes in the maxilla and the mandible. These are fully approved. You have nothing to worry about using mini implants from Shatkin intralock MDL system. Now, this is my patented procedure that I developed back in 2002 and received my patent on in 2006. So we’ve been doing this for a long time, folks.

We have thousands of dentists all over the US. And all over the world using our patented techniques for replacing single teeth, multiple teeth, and roundhouse bridges with single, multiple two mini implants or more for permanent fixed restorations. I had a very unique experience yesterday. I had a patient come in who I haven’t seen in a while. He’s been out of town. I did his two mini implants to replace tooth number three back in 2012. And I wanted to share that with you. So this is the patient, and this x-ray was taken back in 2012.

We had done his mini implants. And you can see not only did we put two mini implants here for number three, but you can also see the very low hanging sinus on this X-ray. That was taken the day of placement of the implants.

You see, the implant was the bone was maybe three or 4 bone. And we pushed the membrane up quite a bit on both that posterior implant. And the meso implant. So I took a post-op X-ray yesterday just to see how things were looking. And here is his postoperative X-ray seven years later.

And you see the two mini implants are solidly in the bone. The bone level is still at the crest, doing very, very well. But what it’s interesting is if we look closely if we look closely at cross section of where the implant was placed into the sinus, you see tremendous bone fill all the way around that implant. And also on the other implant here.

Where we had three or 4 bone, we now have nine or 10 bone. All the way around that implant, both that one and the other one. You can see the shadow of bone all the way around that implant.

Now, these implants and this crown are solid as a rock seven years after placement. So not only does it function perfectly, but radiographically we have evidence of bone fill in the sinus area where we did the sinus lift. So we’ve been performing the Summers sinus lift technique for many, many years using the Osteotomatic technique, but basically just using the implant itself as a sinus bumping instrument.

Now we’ve gone one step further and put all of that technology into the Shatkin sinus lift kit so that we can systematically lift the sinus a specific amount that we want to lift it using bone expanders and instrumentation. But this technique is not a new technique. It’s been used for many, many years with great success. All we did is formulate it into a nice instrumentation kit that’s easy to follow and easy to use for our customers.

And I think attached to this video you’ll find a link where you can watch the actual sinus lift procedure being done by me. And I just want to point out that this patient also, as you can see, had a conventional implant on the upper left side to replace a tooth. And I asked him what his experience was compared to that and the mini implant surgery. And again, if we go back to present day you see the conventional implant certainly is working out pretty well. It’s still in there. He lost some natural teeth behind it. But I asked him about the procedure itself and he said it was like night and day because with the conventional implant took almost a year to perform the procedure.

Between the bone grafting, the placement of the implant, waiting six months for it to heal and then going back and doing a second surgery and putting the crown on, and our technique where you can place the mini implants in one or two short visits, it’s a dramatic change and a dramatic difference.

So he was much happier having the mini implants placed than the conventional implant. So I just want to thank you all for joining me on this Monday morning minute and enjoy placing mini implants and feel very comfortable about everything you’re doing for your patients because these mini implants are extremely successful in all areas of the mouth. And we have long term results to show it.