Losing your teeth can be a pretty frightening experience. It doesn’t matter whether you are young and get them knocked out playing sport or in an accident, or you are knocking on a bit and your teeth are failing due to neglect, night-time grinding or just plain bad luck. When they go, you could be forgiven for panicking a little.

The thing you must not do is put your head in the sand and tell yourself you will sort out replacement teeth in a few months. This is easy if the teeth you are losing are molars tucked away at the back of your mouth where no one can really see them. If it’s your front teeth that are on the way out, or already gone, you’ll be more on the ball, as the gappy look is not one many people aspire to.

The thing is, when you lose your teeth you also start to lose your gums and jawbone. Both of them start to recede in the area of the gap and if you are going to get dental implants, you need a good strong jawbone to put them in.

Dental implants are the only tooth replacement method that replaces the roots of the teeth. This preserves your jawbone as well as allowing you maximum freedom in terms of what you eat. Because dental implants are embedded into the jawbone, they won’t wobble around like dentures can tend to do.

How to get dental implants

The first thing you need to do is come along for a consultation so that we can take x-rays and do a scan of your jawbone and see what condition it is in. If it’s in good shape, we can get on with implant surgery. If not, we may be able to do some work to build it back up.

Dental implant surgery takes place under local anaesthetic. One implant can carry up to three crowns and there are ways for us to put a whole arch of teeth on as few as four implants. You need to give them a few weeks to integrate, but once they have become part of your jawbone, you may even forget they are not your real teeth.