How long does it take to recover from dental implant surgery? Skip to main content

How long does it take to recover from dental implant surgery?

Using the most recent advances in dental implant technology, Dr. Loetscher is able to place single stage implants. These implants do not require a second procedure to uncover them, but do require a minimum of six weeks of healing time before artificial teeth are placed. There are even situations where the implant can be placed at the same time as the tooth extraction – further minimizing your number of surgical procedures.

Dental implant placement is a team effort between an oral and maxillofacial surgeon and a restorative dentist. Dr. Loetscher performs the actual implant surgery, initial tooth extractions, and bone grafting if necessary. The restorative dentist (your dentist) fits and makes the permanent prosthesis. Your dentist will also make any temporary prosthesis needed during the implant process.

“Hello, Dr. Loetshcher here. So, I wanna talk to you a little bit about recovering from dental implants and there’s kinda three ways I look at this. One is a single implant, straightforward case. Number two is an implant of some bone grafting. And the third way I look at it is a full set of teeth of implants that we do, converting someone’s teeth to implants.

So, one of the common procedures that we do is put in a single implant. Quite often, someone will break off a front tooth. It would be an emergency situation. They’ll come in, we’ll put them to sleep, we take the tooth out, put an implant in, make a provisional tooth right there and mill it in the lab. They leave with a front tooth. And those patients the next day, it’s almost like nothing happened. In general, most of those patients don’t have any pain. If it’s right in front of your mouth, you might have a little ache right in this area for the day. So, in the back of the mouth, it’s almost like we didn’t even work on them. So, really quick and easy recovery. On antibiotics for five days.

The other thing that we do is a lot of implants in the back of the mouth, do some bone grafting and a sinus lift. We might harvest some bone from the lower jaw. And for those patients, it’s a little bit of a bigger procedure. They’re gonna have some puffiness for three or four days. But even so, the next day a lot of people go to work, they get back to their normal activities but they might be a little sore for a couple of days because it’s a little bit bigger procedure.

The third thing we do quite a bit of, I take someone’s teeth out and put in maybe six implants per dental arch and provide them with a whole new set of teeth. And for those patients, they’re asleep for several hours, getting the teeth taken out and implant put in. It seems like a lot, but believe it or not, it’s not very invasive and those patients, they wake up, we give them the Novacaine that keeps it numb for 10 or 12 hours, and they’ll go home and the next day a lot of people don’t need narcotics. They might, they might not, but they’ll come in and see us the next day. Sometimes we give them the teeth the day we did it, sometimes they come to screw in a whole set of teeth the next day and they’re not even on pain medications unless we did some bone grafting, then they might be on some pain medication.

But, in general, it’s pretty shocking how easy the recovery is from this. And if we did bone grafting, you’re on antibiotics for about 10 days, otherwise, it’s about five days. We give people narcotics and a lot of patients don’t use narcotics. Even so on the procedures with people with no one, we take bone from their hip and rebuild their jaw. Those patients, I did a study on that one time and like 70% of them didn’t use narcotics after two days so dental implant surgery, in general, is very easily recovered from. You have to eat kinda soft foods and non-abrasive foods for a couple of days but it’s a quick recovery.”

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