Comparing Quotes That Are Not Comparing The Same Thing
You’ve been given a number for full-arch implants and it doesn’t match the one down the road. That gap is usually not about quality. It’s about which line items each practice put inside the quote and which they left outside. Patients here tell us they were comparing two prices. Only later did they find they were comparing two different treatments. You’ll come away knowing what sits inside a full-arch quote and what usually sits outside it. The questions that surface the difference are here too.
Dr. Elaine Wu, DMD was inducted into Omicron Kappa Upsilon, the national dental honors society, for academic excellence and character. She also completed the Kois Center program. That is a full curriculum run over years, not a certificate collected in a weekend. It is built on working out the whole picture before proposing anything. Which is why the scan comes before any figure for full-arch implant treatment at ReNEW Dental. That order matters here more than on any other treatment we offer. A number quoted before anyone has scanned your jaw is a guess with a decimal point on the end.
What Are You Actually Paying For?
A full-arch case replaces every tooth in one jaw on four implants. That’s the All-on-4® protocol, or an equivalent tilted-implant approach. Two of the posts go in straight at the front of the jaw, where bone is usually densest. Two are angled backward. That tilt is what often avoids grafting at the back of the jaw, where bone is thinnest.
That angling is the reason the whole treatment exists in the first place. Grafting the posterior jaw adds months and another surgical stage. Tilting the implants forward reaches denser bone that is already sitting there. The tilt is also why some patients avoid a stage that would otherwise add half a year to treatment. Where the bone genuinely will not take it, our page on what a sinus lift involves covers the alternative route.
Why Is There A Second Set Of Teeth?
Because you get two prostheses, months apart, and quotes differ on whether both are counted. A provisional bridge goes on within hours of surgery. It carries you while the bone fuses. A definitive prosthesis replaces it around four months later, built in stronger material once everything has settled. The provisional is designed to be temporary, and wearing one past its intended life is where problems start.
Source: full-arch rehabilitation protocol described in a 10-year retrospective study of implant-prosthetic rehabilitation, published 2022. Provisional replaced at four months.
The implants and the teeth on top age differently. That difference is the whole cost story. One 12-year study of full-arch cases put implant survival at 92.5 percent and prosthetic survival at 96.2 percent. The posts tend to outlast what sits on them. The prosthesis is the recurring expense over twenty years, not the surgery.
