Is it possible to walk into a dental clinic and have all your old broken, unsightly teeth replaced with shiny white new ones supported by titanium implants all on the same day?
The answer is yes in many cases – providing the case has been prepared carefully in advance.
Over in the States ‘immediate implants’ (also known as ‘teeth in an hour’) are becoming commonplace, and this technique has been available for about 10 years or so.
Here in the UK, we tend to take a rather more cautious approach to our dental implant treatment so a number of us have been waiting on the sidelines to see what the outcome of these more radical treatments was going to be…. In other words, “will it work long term?”
The answer is yes once again.
We now have enough long-term data (over 5 yrs) to convince even the more conservative of us that;
- immediate implant teeth work in the long term
- in some cases doing it this way can improve the aesthetic outcome
- this method can significantly reduce bone the bone shrinkage which occurs when teeth are extracted.
- the immediate implant technique can be used on single, multiple, or full-mouth cases
So there it is. Viable and better, in many cases.
Once again, as with ‘Painless Injections’ the future has arrived, all you need is comprehensive surgical training, advanced surgical equipment, and an open mind…..for the dentist, that is. Our patients are often the people who inspire us to strive to give them these gold standards of dental treatment.
No one mentioned drive-through dentistry though, or it’ll be time to hang up the rubber gloves.
