New Teeth And Go

Dentist Arne Gheorghiu smiles a lot. He has good reasons: the Romanian born took his handful of prizes, but the latest is a sort of Oscars of his profession. The International Congress of Oral Implantologists (ICOI) awarded Gheorghiu the first prize in the Annual Congress for Implantology, at Phoenix, Arizona, for his new approach in the field.

According to Gheorghiu, teeth severely damaged by disease should not be "rescued", but pulled out and immediately replaced with implants. The catch word here is "immediately", since Gheorghiu promises and delivers "new teeth in one day".

Gheorghiu is fiercely against the standard procedure, which requires the patient to stand painful medical procedures spanning over one year, from extracting the patient’s own tooth and replacing it with another one. As Gheorghiu explains, the standards so far were to extract the tooth, then wait for six months for the bone to heal, after which the bone implant was added - first with cutting the gums open and then sawing them back together; after another six months the new fake tooth was added.

Gheorghiu’s method, marketed as "teeth-in-an-hour", does not have many followers, as he himself admits, since dentists are reluctant to shorten the healing process as they new it.

But Gheorghiu does more than that, since he combines the immediate tooth loading procedure with other techniques, like extracting any pathological growths sas cists and granulomat, reconstructing the missing bone, and inserting the implants through the space left open by the extracted tooth, with almost no extra cut to the gums sflaplesst. "

So, what is truly mine is the combination of the various procedures and their use in the space of one day, as opposed to having them spanning over a long time. This is not a magician’s feat, but a new approach," said Gheorghiu.

He lives in Villingen-Schwenningen, Germany, since 1981, when he and his parents emigrated. Gheorghiu came back to Romania in 1991 for his university education, and now would like to come back home to start his medical practice here. However, he is sure Romanians are not yet ready to accept his cutting edge view.

"The problem stays in the people’s minds. Their majority still hold on to their own teeth and want the dentist to rescue them, even if for only a short period of time," said Gheorghiu.

He explained that he had an extremely beautiful female patient, 31-year old, and a public person in Romania, who started to cry when he told her that he suggests pulling out all her teeth to replace them with implants. "She was scared by the thought that she will be toothless, even if that was going to last only a few hours and no one else but me would have seen her," remembers Gheorghiu. "

Finally she accepted to have only one tooth replaced and now, after more than a year had passed and she realized that all went the way I told her it will, she wants the rest of her teeth replaced," said Gheorghiu.

Still, Gheorghiu is sure he would not stand a chance to make a decent living in Romania.

"This was an intelligent and educated person which resisted the idea a lot. I watch Romanian TV programs via satellite, back in Germany, to understand what kind of information Romanians are consuming. My conclusion was that though I love my homeland and cherish my roots, I will not go back there to have people the likes of Gheorghe Becali sa flamboyant, fowl mouthed soccer club owner and players’ managert to demand that I would get out of the operating room because they are rich and famous and are not in the mood to wait in line," said Gheorghiu.

As for his fortune, Gheorghiu says that while he is sure he would make the monthly "Capital 300" list of the richest Romanians, he thinks money are more of a problem than not. "It’s great to spend them, but the higher the turnover of one’s business, the greater the worries: one should deduct expenses to lower the taxes, but one should show some profit, for the banks to trust one. These are never ending problems," added Gheorghiu.