Dental implants are the titanium devices that are attached to your jaw bone in order to allow your dental prosthetics like bridges and false teeth to be attached and kept firmly in place.
In order for dental implants to be successfully placed in your mouth an oral surgeon will need to look at you and your x-rays to determine if there is enough good bone for them to place the device in.
Once the oral surgeon has decided whether or not you are a good candidate for the procedure you will begin to plan the surgery.
Once you are ready to plan the surgery the oral surgeon may require a CT scan, two dimensional radiographs, or other tests that will show them exactly where vital structures within your mouth are located.
They need to know the exact placement of the inferior alveolar nerve and the sinuses are so they can create dental implants that will be perfect for you.
They may need to place a stent in your mouth to guide them through the surgery.
This is nothing more than an acrylic wafer that has the hole patterns required pre drilled into it, and it will be fit into place in your mouth to assure that the surgeon places your devices exactly where they need to be.
Not all dental implants can be loaded with the teeth they are designed to hold in place immediately.
Some of these devices will need to be allowed enough time to heal and allow the bone to begin to grow around the titanium before they are loaded with the teeth.
There are mini versions that allow for immediate loads of teeth, and the success rate of these devices is high.
The actual outcome of the procedure will be determined in part by the skill of the surgeon doing the work, the amount of bone they have to work with, and the quality of the bone they have to work with.
Many surgeons allow as much as six months to pass before they will load these items.
Studies have been done to prove that this may not be necessary in order for the surgery to be successful though.
The reason that the surgeons prefer to wait is that they do not want to cause the item to move any before it begins to get bone growth around it.
If it does move before this time the procedure will be a failure.
If they fail it take as long as eighteen months for the patient to heal enough to try again.
Dentists prefer the better safe than sorry approach to these items.
The surgical procedures are not cheap to have done and the length of recovery time is not really short, so patients do not want to risk their procedure failing.
They also want to take all precautions to not get an infection or other negative condition after they have the surgery done.
Once the surgery has been deemed a success by the surgeon the patient should be able to resume normal activities without any concerns.