Fit and Forget Dental Implants?

I love talking my patients. They are my lifeline to the real world out there – (you know the one where most people don’t spend all day every day thinking about teeth!)
This lady is one of my long standing dental implant patients – a few years ago we completely rebuilt her upper  teeth using custom porcelain bridges supported on titanium implants

The thing is, they look as good today as the day we fitted them all that time ago. But this is no accident. This lady follows Laura’s (one of our lovely hygienists – yes they’re out there, honest!) advice to the letter. She cleans the bridges and implants twice a day, and visits us every 6 months for her Healthy Mouth Review to allow us to monitor the health of her mouth and implants, to clean those areas even she can’t get to, and to carry out our Oral Cancer Check.

This is routine at Winning Smiles.

Implants need as much – possibly more – upkeep than natural teeth…they are a great copy of the real thing (better than a chinese rolex) but even I don’t claim to have beaten mother nature at her own game!

So when Gill told me yesterday that she is coming across more and more people who are benefiting from this sort of dental treatment – but some of them can’t understand why she has to keep coming back to see us for what they see as ‘unnecessary maintenance’,  I had to press her for further clarification! ‘Why?,’ I said.  And Gill went onto explain that these patients are popping into dental practices (yes in the UK) and having implants placed ‘as if they are just expensive fillings’!

This is a worrying trend. Problems with dental implants rarely cause pain, so for a patient who has been advised in this way the first time they realise there is a problem with their dental implants might be the day they fall out! The fact that this may take 5-10 years is what is protecting both these dentists (and their patients – ignorance is bliss) for the time-being. But it’s a ticking time-bomb. These cheap ‘quick-fit’ (and forget) implants have been placed in the last couple of years as more and more of the profession learn about them – in response to greater and greater demand from patients….alas it is only a matter of time before the chickens come home to roost. And when they do, the only winners (as usual) will be the lawyers.

Leaving the cost issue aside, once implants fail it is not nearly as easy to do them a 2nd time. The bone around them disappears – which is why they fall out – so if they fall out, by definition there is often no bone left to put another one in….and this puts us right back to the 1970s: dentures for all.

Happy Easter. Lay off the eggs 😉