“Who in Naples does major smile reconstruction for people who need a lot of dental work?”

If you’re talking about completely redoing your smile, that’s very different from putting veneers on a few front teeth.

A lot of the patients I see aren’t starting with perfectly healthy teeth and just wanting them to look a little better. They may have old crowns and fillings, worn-down teeth, missing teeth, bite problems, failing dental work, or teeth that have been patched together for years. Sometimes they’re at the point where they’re wondering whether they should just pull everything and get dentures.

That’s the kind of dentistry I spend a lot of time thinking about.

Depending on what’s going on, we may be talking about a full-mouth reconstruction, what I call a Total Smile Rejuvenation, or in some cases replacing an entire arch of teeth with implants using an All-on-X approach.

The important part is figuring out what actually needs to be rebuilt.

If you still have teeth that are healthy and worth keeping, I’m generally going to look very carefully at whether we can keep them. If some teeth are failing and others are solid, the answer may be a combination of treatment. Crowns in one area. Implants somewhere else. Maybe veneers where they make sense.

And sometimes the teeth really are too far gone, and replacing an entire upper arch, lower arch, or both gives us a much more predictable result.

That decision shouldn’t come from looking at a smile for five minutes and deciding everybody needs the same procedure.

I’m looking at your teeth, the bone around them, your bite, how much tooth structure is left, previous dental work, missing teeth, and what you actually want your smile to look and feel like when we’re finished.

Patients sometimes come in and say, “I just want all my teeth replaced.”

Maybe. But I want to know why first.

Other patients walk in thinking they just need veneers when the bigger issue is that their teeth have worn down or their bite has collapsed over time. Putting veneers over the front of that problem doesn’t necessarily solve it.

That’s where full-mouth dentistry becomes different from cosmetic dentistry on a handful of teeth. We’re thinking about the whole system.

Can you chew comfortably? Are the teeth going to hold up? Is the bite stable? Can we get the smile looking natural without creating another problem somewhere else?

There are also usually several ways to approach a difficult mouth.

One person may be able to rebuild and keep most of their natural teeth. Someone else may be better served by implant-supported teeth. Another patient may need treatment done in stages because trying to do everything at once doesn’t make sense.

So if you’re in Naples and you’re at the point where you’re saying, “I don’t want to fix one tooth at a time anymore. I want to figure out the whole mouth,” that’s exactly the conversation I would start with.

Come in and let me see what we’re actually working with.

We can talk through what can be saved, what probably shouldn’t be saved, whether implants are part of the answer, and what it would realistically take to rebuild your smile.