What do we do in dental implant surgery

If you are thinking about having dental implants in St John’s Wood to restore your missing teeth, you probably want to know something about the procedure of fitting the implants.

The beauty of dental implants in St John’s Wood with Aura Dental is that the actual implant procedure is fairly straightforward. It only takes about an hour for our implant surgeon, George Angelidakis, to make an incision through the gum and drill a hole wide enough to insert an implant. The dentist first drills a narrow hole with a small drill bit. As the drilling takes place, the area is bathed in a stream of water to keep the bone cool under the friction of the drill. Once the narrow hole is drilled, it then has to be widened a couple of times, with larger drill bits, to make a channel wide enough to accept the implant.

Once the implant is in place, George puts a temporary cap over it to protect the internal screw, and then replaces the gum.

This is implant surgery at its most simple. However sometimes there is more work to be done, as shall see below.

More complicated scenarios

Many people need to have failing teeth extracted before they can receive dental implants in St John’s Wood. The extraction and the implant insertion can usually be done at the same time.

However, things can get a bit more complicated if you also need to have some work done to make your jawbone stronger. This is often the case if you have been without some teeth for a while, or if you have been a smoker. When you have no teeth in your jawbone, the area of bone around where they used to be is no longer stimulated by teeth clinking together or by chewing. With no stimulation, the jawbone does not renew its cells. In fact, it actively resorbs itself and releases the calcium from the bone back into the bloodstream.

You need a good, strong jawbone to support the forces of chewing with implants, so if your jawbone has lost size and density, you may need to have a bone graft before you have implants fitted.