Having a Dental Implant

Having had a dental implant about two years ago, I would recommend this procedure for anyone whose dentist said they are a good candidate. The good thing about a dental implant is that it will be as strong as a natural tooth because the implant material actually makes a chemical bond to the bone in the jaw. The bad thing is that it can take a long time- mine took about 10 months in all. I have heard advertisements for dentists who say they can do implants in one day, but I have no idea how that is possible. Perhaps it is another procedure entirely. For me I had to have a tooth extraction, and a small piece of bone was added to reinforce the implant. After all that healed then the implant was installed in my mouth and that took several months to adhere to the bone.

My case was certainly a bit strange. I went in for a normal six month checkup and cleaning, and my hygienist noticed that there was something wrong with the gums on one of my back lower right teeth. When she pushed down on the gum with a dental tool, the tool would go very far down below the gum line, and this is abnormal. They took an x-ray and discovered that the bottom half of the root on one side of the tooth had disappeared. My dentist said that this is rare, and it appeared my body was rejecting this tooth. He said this can happen after the tooth has been exposed to some kind of trauma, but I can’t recall anything in particular. In any case he said the tooth was certainly infected and would start being painful soon, and he said it needed to come out.

He said I had a couple of options to replace the tooth. One was a bridge, and I know about bridges because I’ve had one on the other side of my mouth since I was eighteen years old. The other option was a newer technology called a dental implant, and he explained that an implant will end up being just as strong as a natural tooth. This is because the titanium material in the implant actually makes a chemical bond with the bone in one’s jaw. The downside is that some implants do not take hold properly. The figures I read in an article were that 95% of the implants on bottom teeth work fine, and the figure for top teeth implants is a bit lower, 90%. My family dentist does not do implants and so he referred me to a periodontist, a specialist. The periodontist examined me, had more detailed x-rays done, and ended up telling me I was a good candidate. It turned out that in either case my dental insurance would cover about half the procedure, and the price for both was about the same. I ended up paying about $2,000 out of pocket.

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Click on Dental Implant Part 2 in the article list above left.