The most asked question about dental implants, besides the obvious enquiry of price, is how long the treatment will take to complete. It may be annoying to patients, but in order to give a satisfactory answer, we need to lo at your general oral health. In other words; it’s complicated.
The reason for this complication is because of dental implant complications. Let’s take the first phase of dental implantation, the actual dental implant surgery. Once it is done, there is a healing time necessary for the jawbone to accept and integrate the dental implant into the jawbone, before it can be used for chewing and before it can handle occlusal forces. Right there the problem comes up, how long is the healing time?
There is no arbitrary answer. Some people heal after just two months, others take six months to heal. A slower healing time is indeed a dental implant complication. The question also arises, does the patient have enough bone material to house an implant at all? If not, a bone graft is necessary, which has a six to eight month healing time as well. The bone graft may need to be redone, as some unfortunate people simply do not integrate the bone graft material. This is a worst case scenario, however, and happens very rarely.
If you have bone degenerative diseases, it may also be the case that the healing period does not provide healing. It may be the case that while your implant is integrating, your jaw bone thins out around the implant, and the area becomes unstable. In these cases a bone graft is necessary, and the implantation needs to be done.
It may also be the case that the dental implant fails to integrate, this is almost always because of some infection in the patients mouth. The overwhelming majority of the times, this is due to the patient arriving with poor oral conditions, and there is some sort of bacteria living in the mouth that infects the implantation site. It may also be due to the dental implant not being sterile. In this case the dental practice is at fault, and you can press charges and/or demand a refund.
If the dental implant itself has problems, then those should become apparent immediately. A shoddy implant can be the cause of many dental implant problems. Usually there is a structural fault with the dental implant, which is the cause of the dental implant complication. The dental implants are manufactured in a factory, and sometimes, mistakes can occur. These are extremely rare however, and usually a dental implant will hold for a lifetime.
