Call Dr.Ellis 303-422-2502
Denver's Leading Dentist for Gum Disease, Root Canals & Implants
Failed Once.
Failed Twice.
Not This Time.
When every other option has been exhausted — the work is just beginning.
Most dentists refer out. Most specialists handle one thing. Dr. Dana Ellis has spent nearly four decades mastering the intersection of periodontics, endodontics, and implantology — which means when a case is complicated, failed, or frankly frightening, he doesn’t send you somewhere else. He steps in.
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This page exists for one reason: you’ve been told it’s too far gone. We disagree.
"Dr. Ellis has spent decades continually studying dentistry, attending conferences, and staying at the forefront of his field — all So ,
"YOU CAN HEAL BETTER "
Dian, 57, ND, Naturopath
Los Angeles CA
"I Tried to Fix It Myself. I Couldn't. I Didn't Know How to Find an Experienced Specialist."
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Three Failed Bone Grafts | Osteopenia | Asian Bone Density Profile | Referred by Her Internist
"The first dentist said the graft failed because I smoked. I quit. The second graft failed anyway. The third dentist said it was just bad luck — some people's bodies don't cooperate. I was 52 years old and being told my jaw was essentially unfixable. I had a gap in my smile I'd been hiding for four years.
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My internist sent me to Dr. Ellis. I came in expecting the same conversation. I left feeling like I had finally been seen by someone who actually understood what had gone wrong.
He looked at the sequencing of all three procedures — the timing, the loading, the membrane choices, the suture technique notes from my records. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said: 'Every one of these grafts was placed into an infected environment. The infection was never fully cleared before the next attempt. You weren't failing the grafts. The grafts were being placed into a site that was never ready.'
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Four years. Three procedures. And not one provider had identified that the original extraction site had harbored a chronic low-grade infection that was invisible on standard X-rays but present in the tissue the entire time. It didn't show up dramatically. It didn't cause obvious pain. It just silently destroyed every graft before it had a chance.
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Dr. Ellis cleared the infection first. Completely. He waited. He monitored. He didn't touch the graft until he was certain the environment was clean. His words were: 'We are not in a hurry. Hurrying is what happened before.'
The fourth graft took. The implant is solid. I tell everyone — the procedure wasn't the problem. It was never the procedure. It was whether the person doing it understood why the last one failed."
The Failed Implant — What Went Wrong and What’s Still Possible
What Is Implant Failure?
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A dental implant fails when it loses its integration with the surrounding bone — a process called osseointegration breakdown. This is not a simple mechanical problem. It is a biological event, and understanding why it happens is the first step to knowing whether it can be corrected.
Implant failure falls into two categories:
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Early failure — The implant never properly fused with the bone after placement. Often linked to inadequate bone density, infection at the surgical site, premature loading before healing is complete, or systemic factors the original provider did not account for.
Late failure — The implant initially integrates but fails months or years later. Peri-implantitis — a bacterial infection attacking the bone around the implant — is the leading cause. Occlusal overload, poor prosthetic design, and unmanaged systemic conditions are also common contributors.
The Science Behind Why Implants Fail
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Bone is not static. It is living tissue that continuously remodels in response to mechanical signals and biological health. When an implant is placed into bone that is compromised — whether from prior infection, systemic disease, smoking, osteopenia, or medication side effects such as bisphosphonate use — the body's ability to integrate and maintain that implant is fundamentally altered.
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The bone-implant interface depends on a precise cascade: osteoblasts building new bone, osteoclasts clearing damaged tissue, and a stable vascular supply delivering the cellular materials needed for healing. When any element of that cascade is disrupted, integration weakens. What looks like a failed implant is often a failed biological environment — and that environment can frequently be restored.
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Gary Stafford, 63 —Greenwood Village, CO
Failed Implant | Bruxism | Lifelong Athlete | Competitive Pickleball Player, 4.75 Rating
"I've been hard on my teeth my entire life and I knew it. Football in high school. Wrestling in college.
Thirty years of grinding at night that nobody caught until the damage was already done. By my forties I had crowns on half my mouth. By my fifties I had my first implant. By sixty-two, that implant had fractured clean through — and the dentist who placed it told me the bone around it was too compromised to try again.
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I wasn't willing to accept that. I play pickleball four days a week at a 4.75 level. I'm on the court at six in the morning. I travel to tournaments. I have a life that requires a body that works — all of it, including my teeth. You can't perform at that level when you're guarding a bite, avoiding certain foods, waking up with jaw pain every morning. People don't talk about how much dental health affects athletic performance. It affects everything — your sleep, your recovery, your focus, the way you hold tension in your whole face and neck during competition.
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My sports medicine doctor pointed me toward Dr. Ellis. He said: 'You need someone who understands that your mouth has been under athletic stress for forty years. Not someone who looks at the X-ray and sees a problem. Someone who looks at you and sees the whole picture.'
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Dr. Ellis was the first dentist who asked me about my sport before he asked me about my teeth. He wanted to know my training schedule, my tournament calendar, my sleep patterns, how I wore my old night guard, whether I noticed jaw tension during match play. He understood immediately that my bruxism wasn't just a nighttime habit — it was forty years of athletic tension that never had anywhere to go.
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He also explained why my implant had fractured in a way that finally made sense to me. The implant diameter had been selected for an average patient with an average bite force. I am not an average patient. Athletes who have ground their teeth for decades generate bite forces that standard implant planning simply doesn't account for. The fixture was never engineered for what I was asking it to do.
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The reconstruction plan he built was unlike anything I'd been offered before. We addressed the bruxism with a precision night guard designed around my actual bite load — not a generic tray but something engineered to distribute force the way my jaw actually works. The new implant was a wider-diameter German-engineered fixture chosen specifically for high occlusal load patients. He rebuilt the bone around the site in stages, and he built the timeline around my tournament schedule because he understood that my life didn't stop.
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I'm back on the court. Sleeping through the night for the first time in years. Eating whatever I want. Playing at the same level — maybe better, honestly, because I'm not carrying that constant low-grade jaw tension into every match anymore.
I'm sixty-three years old and my mouth has never worked this well. That's not something I expected to say."
How Dr. Ellis Approaches
a Failed Implant
Why My Patients Failed Before They Found Me — By Dr. Dana Ellis
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"In nearly forty years I have yet to see a failed implant that surprised me. The reasons are almost always the same — and almost always preventable. A bone graft placed too soon, before the site was truly ready. A graft material chosen by habit rather than by what that specific patient's bone could actually support. A root canal that was never fully resolved, sitting quietly beneath the surface, poisoning the foundation before the implant ever arrived. Or simply a technique issue — placement angle, depth, torque — small errors that compound over time into a failure nobody saw coming. Patients come to me after one failure, two failures, three failures, believing their body is the problem. In most cases, their body was never the problem. The problem was that nobody stopped to read what the body was already telling them."
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When every other option has been exhausted — the work is just beginning.
Most dentists refer out. Most specialists handle one thing. Dr. Dana Ellis has spent nearly four decades mastering the intersection of periodontics, endodontics, and implantology — which means when a case is complicated, failed, or frankly frightening, he doesn’t send you somewhere else. He steps in.
This page exists for one reason: you’ve been told it’s too far gone. We disagree.
Dr. Ellis did it — Without a single cut. I couldn't be happier."
How Dr. Ellis Approaches
On Athletes and Dental Work:
"Athletes are not regular dental patients and I wish more of my colleagues understood that. The forces an athlete generates — especially one who has competed their entire life, who carries chronic muscular tension, who has a history of impact, who grinds at night as a neurological echo of decades of physical competition — those forces are in a completely different category from what standard implant protocols are designed around.
When a lifelong athlete comes to me with a failed implant, I'm not just looking at the implant. I'm looking at forty or fifty years of mechanical history written in bone and enamel and soft tissue. The cracks, the wear patterns, the bone remodeling around old restorations — it all tells a story. My job is to read it correctly.
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Pickleball has brought me a fascinating patient population. The sport attracts highly competitive, physically active people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies who demand full function from their bodies — and who are often carrying decades of unresolved dental stress into a sport that requires explosive movement, breath control, and full-body tension management. Jaw health is part of that system. It is not separate from athletic performance. It never was.
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What I offer these patients isn't just implant placement. It's a reconstruction plan that accounts for who they are physically — their bite load, their tension patterns, their training demands, their recovery needs. The hardware we choose, the timing we set, the protective protocols we build around the restoration — all of it is calibrated to a body that is still performing, still competing, still asking a great deal of itself.
That's work I find genuinely meaningful. These patients don't want to slow down. My job is to make sure their dental health isn't the thing that forces them to."
a Little Voice from
Dr.Ellis
A Note from Dr. Ellis
"Bone is the foundation of everything we do in implant dentistry. Without it, nothing holds. Without it, nothing lasts. I built this page because the patients who need it most are often the ones who have stopped looking — the ones who have been through one graft, two grafts, three grafts, and walked away believing their body had failed them.
It hadn't.
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In almost four decades of practice I have never met a patient whose bone simply refused to heal without a reason. There is always a reason. A missed infection. The wrong material. A site that wasn't ready. A systemic factor nobody thought to measure. Something that was missed — not because the patient was untreatable, but because nobody looked hard enough.
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If you are on this page, you have probably been told a version of 'we've done everything we can.' I want you to know that in most cases, everything has not been done. Everything that was tried before has been done. Those are very different statements.
Come in. Bring your records. Let me look at what actually happened — and what hasn't been tried yet."
GENERAL DENTIST
FAILED HIS IMPLANT
Dr. Richard. 67
Aspen , CO | General Dentist
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Late-Stage Implant Failure | Self-Referred After Attempting Personal Management
"I've placed implants in my own practice for over twenty years. When I started having pain around one of my own implants and imaging showed significant bone loss, I tried to manage it myself. I adjusted the prosthetic, did everything I would do for a patient. It wasn't enough.
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Coming to see another doctor as a patient is humbling when you're a dentist. But I came to Dr. Ellis because I knew the specialty overlap this case required — perio, endo, and implants working together — is genuinely rare. He identified a prosthetic loading issue I had missed, addressed the peri-implantitis with a protocol I hadn't used, and we salvaged the site. I refer patients to him now without hesitation. He's doing work I can't replicate in my own practice."
You Are Not Out of Options. You Just Haven't Seen the Right Doctor Yet.
You Are Not Out of Options. You Just Haven't Seen the Right Doctor Yet.
"I know what it feels like to sit in my chair after a failed implant. Not physically — but I have watched thousands of patients carry it in. The uncertainty. The embarrassment. The quiet fear that your body is somehow broken, that you made the wrong choice, that the window has closed.
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It hasn't.
A failed implant is not a life sentence. It is a starting point — for understanding what went wrong, for rebuilding what was lost, and for doing it correctly this time with someone who has seen every version of this story and knows how it can end well.
You have been through something hard. That took courage. Coming back and trying again — that takes even more. I want you to know that courage is not wasted here.
Every patient who walks through my door with a failed implant gets one promise from me: I will find out why it failed. Not assume. Not guess. Find out. And from that answer, we build something that lasts.
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You deserve a smile you don't have to think about. You deserve to eat, sleep, laugh, and live without your teeth being the thing that holds you back.
Come see me. We'll figure this out together."
— Dr. Dana Ellis
