Recovering from dental implant procedures depend on a number of things such as the number of implants to be placed, complexity of the surgical procedures and the patient’s own healing ability.
After the dental procedure, you can expect numbness from the anaesthesia. This will wear off after a few hours and you may need to take pain medication to relieve the discomfort afterwards. In some cases, general sedation (where the patient is asleep during the procedure) might be used. You will feel a little sleepy or drowsy and will not be permitted to drive so you have to have someone to accompany you on the way home.
For single dental implants (with no additional procedures like bone grafts) the patient can be expected to go back to work or resume daily normal routines immediately afterwards. Patients have reported to have dental implants done on them during their lunch break and were able to go back to work in the afternoon. These things are on a case to case basis though, with some patients opting to rest for a day or so afterwards. There is no set rule that says patients have to take time off from work during their recovery time although overworking and exhausting yourself can affect your recovery.
Some form of discomfort, tenderness and swelling may occur after your visit to the clinic but these can be addressed by over the counter pain medications and antibiotics that your dentist can prescribe for you. A soft diet can also be recommended for the first week after surgery and the normal diet resumed afterwards.
The recovery time as well as the ultimate success of the implants is also dictated by the patient’s compliance to the dental hygiene instructions of the dentist. For those patients who smoke or have a knack of drinking alcohol, these habits need to be minimised as they delay the healing process. The best scenario would be for the patient to completely avoid and quit smoking as this is a proven factor for implant failure.
Once the dental implant is placed, a healing period of 3 to 6 months is observed. In this duration, the implant is expected to fuse with the bone, a process we call osseointegration. During these months, you can resume normal eating habits although it could initially be altered during the first week or so.
People who have insufficient bone volume and height for implants will need to have bone grafts. These bone grafts are done prior to dental implant placement and usually take 4 months to heal. Depending on the state of the bone that needs the bone graft the healing time can take longer and can reach up to 7 or 9 months. Once the bone is stable, the dental implant placement can be done.
As you can observe, the whole process of getting dental implants London coupled with the recovery time takes months. Added to these are the continued cosmetic dental check-ups to routinely check the condition of your implants. As time consuming as it might seem, the healing process is needed for the success of what can be considered as a lifetime replacement for missing teeth…read more
