Does Dental Implants Really Hurt?
by Full Arch Dental Implants Flower Mound TX
Posted on 04-09-2022 06:43 pm
So let's talk about the truth about dental implant treatment and does it hurt? Or what part of the process actually hurts? You see, I place a lot of dental implants every single year and every single one of my patients, I'll see them two weeks later, where we'll have a review, we'll take out any stitches, we make sure everything's healing nicely, and most importantly, I'm gonna ask them what their experience was over that first two weeks. And about 70 to 80% of patients will have a very low experience of pain. Okay, that means it didn't really hurt them very much.
And well, the way I judge it, is how many painkillers they need to take. So the vast majority of people will take less than one painkiller that really suppresses how little discomfort there is afterward. Now, my goal is to always provide the best quality, best-looking tooth on a dental implant, right? And that means sometimes we do a little bit more treatment than other dentists might.
And some dentists are saying, look, we've got a really pain-free procedure with dental implants. And the way they do it is they use guided surgery. So they don't even cut the gum, they make a little stamp in the gum, like they cut a little hole out, exactly the right size as the implant is, they put the implant in, and then they cover that hole up. And to be honest, if you have your dental implants placed like this, then there's not gonna be very much pain and discomfort afterward, because the hole is tiny, there's very little healing that has to happen around that hole and everything's pretty much done. They're not leaving an open wound, okay?
But the problem with this way of doing it and the reason that I almost never do it like this is that you're always gonna compromise the aesthetics.
You see, I've done another video in the past about implants in the front of the mouth. Okay, in what we call the aesthetic sign and implants in that position, are very difficult to get right because you have this problem where you've lost all this bone. So the first thing you need to do when you're looking at putting an implant to replace a tooth and trying to make it look natural, is that you have to replace this lost bone or you need to build up this lack of volume. So for that reason, because you need to do multiple things at once, you need to increase the bone and put the implant in.
My cut is never as tiny as you know, those guys who are saying they use this slight keyhole technique. So even doing that, even doing a bone graft as well. The pain isn't really that much. Now let's talk about those people who do experience pain. Okay, so these are people who've had to take two or three painkillers every day for the first three to four days.
Now, these guys have typically had much more complicated procedures. It's not just putting an implant in with a simple bone graft because we know that hardly causes any discomfort anyway. There are people who've had what we call a complicated bone graft. These people lost a lot of bones over the years.
It's a very difficult situation and you need to do a lot of complicated treatments to rebuild the bone. And typically, this looks worse than it actually feels for the patient. What I mean is you know, they'll wake up in the morning, really swollen, possibly bruised, if we're doing the top part, sometimes they'll have black eyes and things like that. But the amount of pain is only like, you know, one or two painkillers worth of pain, and then as two three four days goes by, the swelling calms down a lot and the pain you know comes down a lot with that as well. We're not talking sleepless nights, we're talking annoying pain, a soreness that is there for pretty much most of the time. Okay, so, in summary, dental implants for the vast majority of people are not very painful at all.
And for those people who it is painful for, then you typically had a much more complicated procedure. Now, the only kind of category of people that have missed out here is where things haven't gone to plan is there is some level of infection or something like that, something's not, you know, happen properly relating to that. So if there's an infection around an implant, if there's an infection around a bone graft, stuff like that, yeah, that is most likely going to cause some level of pain. But those situations are so rare, especially my surgery, that I can almost exclude them. It might happen yeah, a couple of times a year or something like that.
So if you're thinking about having dental implant treatment, and you're finding these videos useful, you can click the subscribe button on my page.
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