Some dental treatments are done in a matter of minutes. Others take as much as a year to complete. The treatment is a journey of several stages and sometimes long periods between those stages. But the destination is well worth the trek. One of those treatments is dental implants, the modern way to replace lost teeth.

Let’s take a look at the stages involved in getting dental implants here at Farnham Road Dental Practice is Guildford:

Consultation

This is much more than a chat. We take an in-depth look at your mouth and particularly at your jawbone. We need to make sure that your jawbone is robust enough for treatment and to sustain the dental implants once you start chewing on them with full power.

Preparatory work

If we think your jawbone has deteriorated, we can suggest getting bone grafts, or sinus lifts, or, if it’s the upper jaw, having extra-long dental implants that anchor into your cheekbone.

If you have had gaps for a while, your remaining teeth may have wandered a bit and you may need to wear braces for a while to put them back into alignment so there is enough space to fit your implants.

All this can extra months to your treatment journey.

You may also need to have other failing teeth extracted.

Implant surgery

This is a minor surgical operation that takes place under local anaesthetic. We are usually done in a morning or an afternoon.

Healing time

This is the important bit. You need to allow 2-6 months, depending on your individual healing speed, for your dental implants to integrate with your jawbone. During this time, the jawbone grows new bone tissue, including blood vessels, all over the surface of the dental implant.

Fitting the crowns

The final part is fitting the hand-crafted porcelain crowns. Once they are in place, you can eat whatever you like.

Maintenance

This is the easy part. A diligent oral health care routine and regular hygienist sessions to remove plaque is all you need to take care of your dental implants.

Want to know more? Why not book a chat with our implant dentist?

Back in the day of your grandparents, if you lost all your teeth, you’d only get one option for replacing them and that would be with dentures. Dentures are replacement crowns set on a plate that is gum-coloured and fits over the gums, relying on suction for stability.

Dentures were big news in their day in the mid-20^th century. In fact, for a couple of decades, there was a big trend to have all your teeth removed as a young adult and replace them with dentures; the idea being that it would give you great teeth for life and save on dental costs.

People didn’t know how much dentures were going to wobble around.

However, that was then, and this is now. Now, we have more choices and one of those is replacement teeth that are firmly anchored into the jawbone and never wobble.

This latest generation of replacement teeth are called dental implants and they work so well because they replace the root of the tooth too, which dentures don’t.

At Farnham Road Dental Practice in Guildford, more and more of our patients are having dental implants fitted because they are the best way to mimic the teeth that have been lost.

Imagine how hard it is to get a good chew going using teeth that are resting on the gums and don’t always fit so well after a while. You can see that you might be reduced to living on soft foods only and having to cut your food into small pieces before you eat.

With dental implants, you get your full chewing power back and with it, the full range of food choices return too. If you want to bite into a toffee apple at the fair, go right ahead. You won’t need to worry that you’ll become one of the comedy acts when your teeth stay in the apple.

Getting dental implants starts with coming in for a consultation. We need to find out how strong your jawbone is, and whether or not it will be able to hold onto the implant once you start chewing on it.

Give the clinic a call and let’s get going on your new set of teeth.

If you have been thinking about replacing your lost or failing teeth with dental implants, you may have been talking to friends and colleagues about the process. You may even have heard stories of terrible pain endured and long healing processes suffered through.

If you have, please don’t take them all as gospel. Human beings have a habit of making medical procedures sound worse than they actually are. It’s better to find out from us at Farnham Road Dental Practice in Guildford than from someone who may be subconsciously trying to make themselves sound heroic.

So, here’s quick heads-up of what to expect if you decide to get dental implants fitted.

Which teeth?

It all starts with an in-depth consultation. Our implant dentist will carry out a thorough examination of your teeth, to be clear about what needs to be replaced. You may have teeth that are starting to fail, and it might be easier to take them out now and replace them with crowns on a dental implant. For example, if you have a gap and one or both teeth either side of it are looking likely to fail in the near-ish future, you can get them taken out now and have the whole lot replaced on one dental implant.

Your jawbone

The implant surgeon will also need to take a good look at your jawbone with x-rays and scans. This is to see if it is strong and dense enough to sustain dental implants. If it has deteriorated, you might need to have preparatory work done, in the shape of bone grafts or sinus lifts. Or you could have extra-long implants that anchor into your cheekbones.

The procedure

This takes place under local anaesthetic, which is more than enough to numb the jawbone, which has very few nerves in it to transmit pain signals. If you are nervous, you can also have sedation so that you can deeply relax.

Afterwards

We recommend a day in bed to recover. Any pain can be treated with over-the-counter painkillers. Plus, a liquid diet for a week or so and soft food until your implants have integrated with your jawbone, in 2-6 months.

Give us a call for an exploratory chat.

What is it about people that tells us how old they are? There are signs that we associate with age. Silver hair is one. Mottled skin is another. Stiffness of movement one more. And lastly, there is the pointy chin that seems to come up to the end of the nose.

This last one is not caused by age, but by loss of teeth. When a tooth is lost, the bone around where the tooth used to be starts to disappear. It literally melts away, and it doesn’t take very long to do so either.

Resorption

This is the technical term for when the body dissolves part of itself. This is what it does with the jawbone when a tooth has come out. The jawbone can lose up to 25% of its size and density in the first year alone after tooth loss. If you have lost a tooth, you can probably feel quite an arch in the bone where it used to be if you run your tongue over it.

Tipping over

As the bone melts away, the nutrients are sent for use elsewhere in the body, which is efficient. But the effect is that the neighbouring teeth are no longer held so securely in their sockets and they can start to tip into the gap and may even fall out, and so a domino effect can start to take place.

Stop resorption

It is possible to stop resorption, but it means having to replace the lost tooth root as well as the crown. Dentures and fixed bridgework won’t stop it, but dental implants will. Dental implants, which are available from us at Farnham Road Dental Practice in Guildford, are the only tooth replacement method that replaces the root of the tooth as well as the crown.

One dental implant can replace up to 3 teeth on a bridge. Dental implants last for a long time, maybe even the rest of your life, so they are a great investment.

Find out more

If you’d like to know more, please call us and come in for a chat and a consultation. You can keep your youthful profile with dental implants in your jaw.

Now that most or all of your teeth have failed, what kind of replacement teeth will you have? Will be dentures, those tried, trusted and comparatively inexpensive replacement teeth? Or will it be a way of replacing teeth that may be completely new to you – dental implants?

In Guildford, at Farnham Road Dental Practice, we know that our patients need a bit of time to think about the right way to replace their teeth. You need time to weigh up the pros and cons of the 2 methods. You may need to talk them over with us more than once, and that’s understandable too. This is a decision that will affect the rest of your life.

We are always happy to talk about the benefits our various treatments, and we won’t pressure you to decide on one method over the other. Let’s kick off that conversation now, with a look at what dental implants are and their benefits as replacement teeth.

Get your roots back

There is one important difference with dental implants and that is that they replace your tooth roots, not just the crowns of your teeth. Dentures, on the other hand, use suction to the gums and jawbone for their stability, so they need to fit really well.

Fusing with your jawbone

When you get dental implants put into your jawbone, they then fuse with it over the following 2-6 months. They can then withstand chewing pressures of 97kg or 200lbs, which is more pressure than the average male adult exerts when chewing. You can once again eat whatever takes your fancy, from toffee apples at the fair, to nuts and roast potatoes. Nothing is out of bounds due to lack of stability or fear of breakage.

Disappearing jawbone

Without tooth roots to stimulate cell renewal, the jawbone rapidly starts to disappear. The chin looks pointier, the face starts to collapse in on itself, and all of a sudden, you look older. Dental implants stop this happening.

Price

Although they have a high initial outlay compared to dentures, dental implants can last for decades and so end up costing about the same as dentures, which must be replaced every few years.

You may be one of Guildford’s most diligent tooth brushes and flossers, but no matter how on it you are with the oral hygiene, if your teeth are discoloured, they are never going to look amazing.

And that feeling that everyone notices what colour your teeth are? Well, it’s real. Human beings evolved to hone in each other’s smiles, firstly as a way as telling if someone is a friend or an enemy, but also as a way of assessing their general health. We can’t help but look.

Good news: teeth whitening is easy

The good news is that most discolouration is just surface. Staining builds up over the years after minute traces of drinks such as red wine, tea or coffee and foods such as rich tomato sauces get trapped in the pores of our tooth enamel.

It can be easily removed with a good teeth-whitening gel, such as Enlighten, which is what we use here at Farnham Road Dental Practice. In all the time we have been using the Enlighten system, we have had 100% success.

The active ingredient in teeth whitening gel is hydrogen peroxide. This whitener has been around for a couple of hundred years and is also used to bleach hair. It comes in different strengths. The gel we use is stronger by far than the gels you can buy in a supermarket or on the internet.

Whitening at home

If you’d like to get your teeth whitened, you need to come into the dental clinic so that we can take impressions of your teeth and use them to make you a pair of whitening trays that exactly fit your teeth. The trays ensure that there is maximum contact between the gel and your teeth.

You put the gel in the trays and wear them every day for a short period every day for 2-3 weeks. We also supply you with a desensitising gel as sensitivity can be an issue when you get your teeth whitened.

Whitening is not permanent, but you can top up your treatment every 3-4 months by wearing the gel trays overnight.