Dr. Kourosh Keihani remembers a call that came in on a Friday afternoon — a patient, not one of his regulars, who had cracked a tooth on something hard at lunch and spent two hours searching for someone who could see her that day. She had called four offices before she reached Oaks Dental. Three of them told her the earliest available appointment was the following week. "She came in, we handled it the same day, and she left without pain," Dr. Keihani says. "She's been a patient ever since. But what I remember most is that she said, 'I didn't think anyone would actually see me.' That stuck with me. Because that's not how it should be." It is a small story, but it captures something essential about how Dr. Keihani thinks about urgent dental care — and why the way a practice responds in an unplanned moment reveals more about its values than any marketing ever could.
Dr. Keihani is a USC-trained dentist and recipient of the California Best Dentist Award who founded Oaks Dental at 5000 Parkway Calabasas with a specific conviction: that a truly full-service dental practice cannot treat emergencies as an inconvenience. The studio he built — equipped with Cone Beam CT imaging, intraoral 3D scanners, laser dentistry, and same-day crown technology — was designed precisely for moments when the situation does not allow for a scheduled appointment two weeks out. The technology exists to respond quickly and accurately. The philosophy behind it exists to make sure that response actually happens.
For anyone in the Calabasas area who has ever found themselves in sudden dental pain and unsure where to turn, here is a closer look at how Dr. Keihani thinks about urgent care — and what anyone in that situation should understand before they make a single call.
What a Dental Emergency Actually Is — And Why the First Hour Matters More Than Most People Know
"The biggest mistake people make in a dental emergency is waiting," Dr. Keihani says. "They think they can manage it over the weekend, take some ibuprofen, see how it feels Monday. And sometimes that works out. But sometimes it doesn't — and the difference between a tooth that can be saved and a tooth that cannot often comes down to how quickly someone gets into a chair."
The range of situations that qualify as dental emergencies is wider than most patients realize. The obvious ones are there — a tooth knocked out by impact, a severe abscess, a broken crown that has left a nerve exposed. But Dr. Keihani is equally attentive to presentations that patients sometimes dismiss as minor: a persistent toothache that intensifies overnight, swelling in the jaw or gums that was not there the day before, a filling that has come loose and left the underlying tooth vulnerable. "Pain is your body telling you something is wrong," he says. "It doesn't always mean the situation is catastrophic. But it always means the situation deserves attention."
The first hour of a dental emergency, he explains, is particularly consequential in cases involving a tooth that has been knocked out entirely. If the tooth is intact and the patient can get to a provider within sixty minutes, reimplantation is often possible. After that window closes, the odds change significantly. Most people do not know this. Most people, in the shock of the moment, are focused on managing the pain rather than understanding the timeline. Part of what Oaks Dental does in those first moments — on the phone, before the patient even arrives — is help them understand what to do with the tooth in the interim, how to manage the situation, and how quickly they need to move.
Same-day crowns represent one of the most practically significant capabilities at Oaks Dental for emergency cases. A tooth that has fractured significantly — enough that a standard filling is no longer appropriate — would traditionally require two appointments: one to prepare the tooth and place a temporary, and a second, weeks later, to seat the permanent restoration. With in-office milling technology, that process collapses into a single visit. The patient leaves with a permanent crown the same day. "For someone who came in in pain and didn't know if their tooth could be saved, leaving with a permanent restoration is a completely different experience than leaving with a temporary and a follow-up appointment," Dr. Keihani says. "It closes the loop. That matters."
Laser dentistry also plays a meaningful role in how Oaks Dental handles certain urgent presentations. For patients with acute gum infections or soft tissue issues that require immediate intervention, laser treatment allows for precise, minimally invasive care with significantly less discomfort and faster recovery than traditional surgical approaches. It is not a tool that most practices have, and its presence at Oaks Dental reflects a deliberate investment in the ability to handle a broader range of urgent situations in-house rather than referring patients elsewhere.
What Calabasas Residents Need to Understand About Urgent Dental Care in This Market
The San Fernando Valley has no shortage of dental practices. What it has a shortage of is practices that are genuinely equipped — in terms of both technology and operational willingness — to handle urgent cases on the day they present. The gap between a practice that technically accepts emergency appointments and one that can actually resolve the problem in a single visit is significant, and it is not always visible until you are already in the chair.
Dr. Keihani is candid about what he sees in the market. "A lot of practices will get you in for an emergency, take an X-ray, tell you what's wrong, and schedule you for treatment later," he says. "That's not nothing — at least you know what you're dealing with. But it's also not the same as actually fixing the problem. If someone is in pain and they've rearranged their day to get to us, my goal is that they leave without that pain. Not next week. Today."
That operational commitment requires more than intention. It requires the right technology in-house — because a practice that needs to send work to an outside lab cannot offer same-day restorations regardless of how willing it is to try. It requires a team that is trained to triage accurately and move efficiently when the situation demands it. And it requires a provider who has built the practice around genuine full-service capability rather than a narrow menu of scheduled procedures.
For Calabasas residents specifically, Dr. Keihani observes that the patients who tend to struggle most in a dental emergency are those who have never established care with a local provider. They are searching from scratch, in pain, without a relationship, without records, and without any sense of who to trust. "That's a terrible position to be in," he says. "We see it regularly. And we do everything we can to make that experience as smooth as possible for someone who just found us. But the honest advice is: don't wait for an emergency to find a dentist. Find one now, while you have the time to make a good decision."
What to Ask Before You Need Emergency Care — and What to Look for When You Do
The best time to evaluate a dental practice's emergency capabilities is before you need them. Dr. Keihani suggests treating that question as a standard part of any new patient consultation — not as a hypothetical, but as a practical matter of understanding what you are signing up for.
Ask directly: if I have a dental emergency, what happens? A practice that can give you a clear, specific answer — same-day appointments available, in-house technology for restorations, a direct line to reach the team — is showing you something real about how it operates. A practice that gives you a vague answer about "doing their best" or directs you to an emergency dental hotline is also showing you something real.
Ask about the technology on-site. The presence of same-day crown capability, digital imaging, and laser dentistry is not incidental — it is the difference between a practice that can resolve an emergency in one visit and one that can only assess it. At Oaks Dental, Cone Beam CT imaging allows for diagnostic accuracy that standard X-rays cannot match, which means that in an urgent situation, the clinical picture is clear from the first moment. That clarity drives faster, better decisions.
If you find yourself searching for urgent care without an established provider, look for practices with same-day availability and documented capability — not just stated willingness. Check the reviews specifically for mentions of emergency care. Patients who have been through that experience tend to describe it in detail, and those accounts are more informative than any general rating. A 5.0 rating built across nearly 200 reviews, as Oaks Dental has earned, carries weight precisely because it reflects a sustained pattern of experience rather than a handful of outliers.
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Finally, ask about what the practice can handle in-house versus what it refers out. A provider who is honest about the boundaries of their capability — and who has strong referral relationships for the cases that fall outside it — is more trustworthy, not less, than one who claims to handle everything.
The Practice That Answers When You Call
There is a version of dental care that is designed entirely around the practice's convenience — scheduled far in advance, structured around predictable procedures, closed off to the messy unpredictability of urgent situations. Dr. Keihani built Oaks Dental as a deliberate alternative to that model. Not because emergencies are good for business, but because a practice that cannot show up for a patient in their worst moment has not actually earned the relationship it claims to have.
"This is when people are scared," he says. "They're in pain. They don't know what's happening with their tooth. They need someone to pick up the phone, tell them to come in, and take care of it. That's what we do. That's what we've always done." For anyone in Calabasas who has found themselves in that position — or who wants to know where to turn before they ever do — Oaks Dental is worth knowing about before the moment arrives.