Often we get people calling our office enquiring about prices. How much does it cost? How much is an implant? How much to get all my teeth fixed?
Its like me asking you how much a car costs.
Yes, you ask, but you didn’t say what sort of car.
Exactly. My first car cost me $250. The last car I bought was $7000. I know for a fact that there are a few cars on the market that are just a little bit more expensive than that!
Just the same, dentistry can cost a little or a lot depending on what you want to do, what your budget is, and often just the stage of life you are in. Dentists spend a lot of time putting back the teeth that people had taken out when they were bringing up their families and felt they couldn’t afford anything “fancy.”
So what is the cheapest sort of dentistry? After doing dentistry for a 26 years, I’ve found that the dentistry that is cheapest is dentistry that lasts a long time and doesn’t have to be redone too often.
The most expensive dentistry is often the cheap option that fails and has to be done over, usually in a more costly and complicated way. A good example would be a tooth with a crack in it.
One option is to place a crown or cap on the tooth. Another option is to do nothing. Just recently, I had a couple of patients whose cracked teeth split right into the nerve. They then needed root canal therapy and a crown, which nearly doubles the cost, or an implant, which may even three to four times the cost once it is all said and done.
Perhaps you want to save money by not getting x-rays at your check-up, but then we miss seeing a cavity and a $300 filling becomes a $3000 root canal treatment, buildup and crown.
Maybe you lose a tooth and then put off getting it replaced with an implant right away. Usually the bone and gum shrinks away and when you go to get the implant a year later, suddenly you need a bone graft before you can place the implant.
Periodontal disease is much easier and inexpensive to treat if caught early. If left untreated for a while, soon it needs to be treated with surgery or the teeth will be lost. (To say nothing about the harm to the rest of your health….a subject for another blog.)
I think you start to see a bit of a pattern. Doing it right the first time is often the cheapest and least painful option.
Janice Frederick, DDSMendota Dental Associates
720 Main Street, Suite 213
Mendota Heights, MN 55118
651-209-9219
www.MendotaFamilyDental.com
