– Dental implants, what is the process? What is the procedure? What’s you know, there are lots of questions we get daily. I’m gonna try and summarise a journey you will have as a dental implant patient, at least in our clinic.
The Steps to the Dental Implant Procedure
1.Check all the teeth
So basically, the first step is that we check your teeth. All your teeth. Before we can do a dental implant, we need to make sure that you have a healthy mouth. An unhealthy mouth is not going to be ready for an implant. You’ll have a lot of trouble.
So once you come to see us, we spend about an hour, 45 minutes, take x-rays and check all your teeth.
2. Digital CT Scan
If everything’s a thumbs up, then we concentrate on that missing tooth. So we send you for a CT scan. Now this CT scan will exactly tell us how much bone you have.
Now to make things even easier for yourself and us, we will do a scan. So in the olden days, we would take some mould. We lucky enough to have digital technology, so we will scan your mouth. With this scan, we will tie up the cone beam CT together. So this is an example where we have done the scan. Now we can see exactly how much bone you have, what size of implant and width of an implant can go in there. If we find that you don’t have enough bone, we tell you that an edit procedure of bone grafting is needed.
3. Implant is made with guided surgery
Sometimes, this can take the whole process to six months because you might need some major grafting. If everything is good and you don’t need any major grafting, we book you in, we do guided surgery. So a special guide is made, we put it in there, we put the implant in, stitch things back, we wait for three to four months for the implant to heal.
4. We do another scan prior to setting the tooth in place
And then you come back again, we do another scan, we send it to the lab.
5. The tooth is screwed into the implant
In two to two and a half weeks, you have a tooth, and then we screw the tooth into the implant, make sure everything’s fine.
Some FAQs on Dental Implants
How long do dental implants take from start to finish?
If everything’s good, you can have an implant in three months. If we need a lot of extensive grafting, it can take anywhere from six months to a year. Sometimes, when it’s a front tooth, we are able to do an immediate implant. But that means is we again go through our planning, we will put the implant in. Before we put the implant in, we’ll get our lab to make a temporary crown which is already ready.
Can you get a temporary tooth while waiting for an implant?
Once we put the implant in, we’ll screw the temporary crown on at the same time. So as you walk out, you walk out with a tooth while waiting for the actual tooth on the implant.
So that same day dentistry type thing, unfortunately, it cannot be done in all the cases; But it is available and it is possible. The other thing after the whole process is finished, all you have to do is just see your hygienist your dentist six-monthly, and look after them.
