Dr. Richard Tokuyama first opened our doors in the Thousand Oaks/Westlake Village area in 1975. Then Dr. Jim Osaki, his USC Dental School classmate, joined him in 1976. In 1981 our second office was started in Simi Valley before Dr. Bennion joined our team in 1983 and Dr. Nikchevich was added in 1991. Since then both Dr.Osaki, Dr.Tokuyama and Dr. Bennion have retired and Dr. Newton and Dr. Ozaki joined our practice in 2001 and 2005 respectively. Dr. Sarkisian, our newest addition, joined our practice in 2018.

All of our doctors are Board Certified or Board Eligible in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. Additionally, Dr. Ozaki is a Board Certified Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon. We have eleven graduate and postgraduate degrees between us, and well over 70 years of combined clinical experiences in the dental and medical sciences. We belong to many state and national dental and medical
societies, the ADA, AMA, CDA, AAOMS (the American Society of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons) and CALAOMS (the California Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons). In this day and age group specialties are not the rule; however, we have benefited from being partners for many years, learning from one another and making an effort to treat our patients as well as possible, gleaning from our vast and separate backgrounds. Although we all do largely the same procedures, each of us has our own expertise. One of us teaches CPR, Basic Life Support and Advanced Cardiac Life Support to the dental offices and the local hospital, and all of us have basic life support and advanced cardiac life support. Two of us have worked for the State of California for many years, examining other oral surgery offices to determine whether their office general anesthesia practices and equipment are safe for the public.

Many of the people who work with us have been employed at our office for over twenty years, and our facilities contain the finest operating rooms, the latest equipment (such as a cone-beam CT scanner, implant surgery robot and 3D scanning systems) and the best sterilization routines. We offer many types of out-patient anesthesia choices, including oral or intravenous sedation and general anesthesia. Dr. Nikchevich is widely regarded by our profession as one of the premier implantologists in Southern California. In addition to his vast surgical experience, he has run our monthly Conejo/Simi Valley Dental Implant Study Club for over 27 years, which is well attended by the best dentists in our area. In addition, many dentists in the Southern California area have scrubbed with him to watch and learn the latest implant placement
techniques. We utilize many different implant systems depending on the specifics of each case, and our four implant coordinators will help facilitate your experience with us.

Additional procedures we specialize in are cleft lip and palate, jaw deformities, facial trauma, removal and reconstruction of most oral pathology cases, and extractions of wisdom teeth (third molars) and other teeth that cannot be saved by usual dental means.

For the last 40+ years, we have been lucky to have the best source of referrals from our dental and medical communities and have even been more fortunate to treat the best patients in the world. We are delighted to find many previous families bringing in their new generations and their friends for us to treat.

It is our goal that our staff will help you navigate the tangled health care system as well as we can. To help this we will submit your paperwork for you and submit your diagnoses and procedure codes to your dental and medical insurances to the best of our abilities.

We try to give you professional care in the best way possible. We are always on call for our patients. We look forward to having you be a part of our family.

Sincerely,

The Doctors of Westlake Oral and Plastic Surgery