Why Does It Take So Long?
As an oral surgeon, I want to share with you a question I often get asked – Why does it take so long for me to replace this tooth with a dental implant? Well, the simple answer is because we’ve got to allow your body to heal twice. What I mean by that is once we remove that tooth and placeour bone graft in that area your body’s first got to heal that bone graft. I wish we’d figured out a way to make bones heal faster, we just haven’t. We still have to place your arm in a cast when you break it, we still have to put pins and rods in places and then we’ve got to let that bone mature, that typically can take between two and three months. Once that bone heals and matures now it’s ready to accept the dental implant, which is just an artificial root. It needs to be placed into that bone and then just like the bone originally needed to heal it needs to cure and set to that dental implant, which can take another two or three months. At the end of that four to six month period we’re finally ready to have a tooth placed but the only reason it took so long is because wewanted to make sure you had healthy bone and that it had time to get strong enough to support that tooth so later in your life you can have that tooth for a long long time.