Comprehensive Dental Services

At Hammer and Van Zant Family Dentistry, we offer a range of comprehensive dental services to patients of all ages. Dr. Van Zant has the skills and knowledge necessary to provide every patient with the care they need and deserve. With a warm and welcoming environment, our patients feel comfortable and can ask any questions they may have about their dental procedures.

Services we offer include, but are not limited to:

Digital Dental Office

Our office is proud to be a nearly-paperless dental office. While switching over to computers has been a profound change for many of us in our office, and it has been especially hard on those of us in our office that grew up with black and white local broadcast television (Remember the old rabbit ears antenna?), 45 rpm records and eight track tapes.

As we have transitioned over to the new digital world, we have found it to be amazingly better than our old-school dental office ways. Digital x-ray images can now be blown up on a monitor screen to reveal never-before-seen detail with amazing clarity and can be emailed when needed in a split-second. Insurance forms are now generated, filled out and emailed to the insurance company automatically. Faster and more accurate filing of insurance and other paperwork is making our office more efficient in providing you, our patients, with quicker and more accurate insurance handling. Computerized/ digital methods of providing dental treatment are decreasing the number and length of appointments needed for dental treatment. Laser scanning is taking the place of many older impression procedures, and 3D CAD/CAM milled ceramic and zirconia crowns that very closely resemble real natural teeth have, in most cases, taken the place of those old ugly gold, silver, and porcelain-on-metal crowns that required patients to wait for weeks with a nasty, annoying, temporary crown while a dental laboratory made their crown. Endodontic (root canal) procedures are now routinely done using precision rotary nickel-titanium digital systems in a much more pleasant manner and with a higher rate of success than the old multi appointment root canal procedures. Naturally aesthetic tooth-colored filling materials have replaced the old, dark, tarnishing mercury-silver-alloy fillings of the past.

Sure, it can be intimidating to see computers replacing the old ways of doing things but in dentistry, like medicine and everything else in the world, technology will carry us into an exciting future ahead. Unfortunately, it has created a tremendous burden for dentists and other healthcare professionals as they constantly re-invest time and money in taking new classes and training to keep up with all of the changes. New knowledge and technologies help us to better care for and serve our patients, but it can rapidly run us over if we don’t work hard to keep up with it. A century ago, the industrial revolution brought us horseless carriages which quickly evolved into the modern automobile ,and the first airplanes which quickly evolved into the commercial airlines of today, and Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone which has evolved into our smart cell phone of today. These all should leave no doubt that our world is quickly changing and that we can ill-afford to not change with it. In 2012, many insurance companies have mandated the conversion to electronic processing of insurance paperwork.

Yes, the old paper way of doing things is quickly going the way of the old pony express. I’m sure, back at that time, many people thought the pony express could never be replaced by wire communication.

We’ve made the choice to embrace the rapidly expanding world of dental knowledge and technologies. We always work hard and patiently, to very carefully sift through all of that new knowledge and technology, separating the wheat from the chaff, to provide only the best, safest, and most proven of the wonderful improvements in dental treatment and care for our patients.