I’m thinking about replacing a missing back molar on my lower jaw with an implant.
I’ve heard they put in the stem, and then you have to wait at least 4 to 5 months for the crown.
The lady I briefly talked with had hers done three days ago. She said it was sensitive but didn’t actually throb or hurt.
How was your experience with the dental implant?
Any discomfort when they put in the pin and drilled the bone? How about afterward? Did you have to avoid chewing or have anything touch that pin?
Hot/ Cold sensitivity? With the pin or the crown later?
After the crown was put on. Any issues chewing? pain or discomfort?
Glad you got it done? or do you regret it?
I’m seriously thinking about this procedure. It’s a lot of money. Even with dental insurance, I’m still looking at over a thousand bucks out of pocket. The tooth was pulled 5 years ago. I’ve done pretty well without it. But, it would be nice to have a molar on that side of my mouth.
I’m a big coffee drinker, and have concerns about heat sensitivity. Lingering pain when I tried to chew would totally suck.
I’ve had three root canals in my life. Four crowns. So, I’m familiar with dental procedures. My last crown was pretty tender and cold sensitive for several weeks. I thought another root canal might be needed. Thankfully, the tooth settled down.
It can be a tough procedure. But if its done right there shouldn’t be much discomfort afterwards. Usually no worse than when you lose the tooth. You have to wait for the bone to grow in around the implant before it has the strength to support the crown when chewing. I have two implants, glad to have them. They were expensive, even with double dental insurance coverage. Neither policy would cover the cost of the implant or operation, but all the anaesthetic and xrays were covered, along with the initial consultation. I’ve experienced no sensitivity.
Greatest thing since sliced bread. I wish the rest of my teeth would fall out so I could have all implants. As it is, I only have one. My tooth broke so I had the remainder extracted. The dental surgeon had me wait until the socket completely healed over before installing the implant part. Then I had to wait for that to completely heal and bond with the bone. I think from start to finish it was three or four months until I had the ceramic tooth installed. I never had any serious pain or discomfort during the entire process. It’s been great so far and, as a serious ice chewer, I’m sure I’ve put my fake tooth to a pretty harsh test.
I had five implants done a couple years ago. When they planned to pull the teeth, I had a couple of impacted wisdom teeth that had never bothered me, but had to be removed as well. The recovery from the wisdom tooth removal was far, far worse than anything else in the whole procedure.
Since I had five teeth replaced, several of which were molars, the procedure to install the posts was a fairly long one with my mouth wide open for the whole thing, which did cause some soreness in the jaw that was probably the most discomfort in the procedure.
So if you can imagine holding your jaw open for a couple hours, well, the implant procedure itself should be less of a problem than that.
I was given a vicodin prescription, and I did take one immediately, but that was the only one I took and I probably didn’t even need that.
Thanks for sharing your experiences with implants. It’s encouraging to hear that the procedure yields good results. I’m beginning to accept that a bit of discomfort in the beginning is worth it to get a new tooth.
My wife got the post installed a couple of weeks ago, and is waiting out the time until she gets the crown. She has had remarkably little discomfort - and the procedure itself took less than twenty minutes!
Don’t believe them when they say implants are always permanent. I had an entire set of upper implants and somehow they got infected. This often happens to smokers or people who don’t take care of their teeth, but neither applies to me. By the time my dentist noticed the infection it was too late to save them. They had to be removed (at additional expense), and now I have an upper denture.
I’m curious about this too. I had a tooth pulled in late September and there was some discussion about whether I would have a bridge or an implant done afterward. I was told that a bridge would be almost impossible because one of the adjoining teeth is a crooked wisdom tooth, so I’d be better off with an implant. The when the dentist did the extraction he did something (I can’t remember exactly what he called it, but I think it might have been a “substrate”?) to prepare the area for the implant. He said I’d have to wait until at least January to have the implant put in, so now I’m trying to decide when I want to have it done. One thing I’m concerned about is how much and how long my mouth is going to hurt after the implant is installed; I’ve got a trip planned for mid-February and I’d really rather not have to spend it popping pain pills.
My left upper eyetooth (3rd tooth from center) is an implant. Had the whole thing done 10 years ago, and while the whole thing took most of a year from beginning to end, there were really no problems during the transition, and the implant is doing fine 10 years later.
The key maintenance issue is to be religious about flossing around the implant daily. If you do that, I was told by both my dentist and my oral surgeon, everything should be good. And it has been.
Both my sons had 4 implants each. While certainly an uncomfortable procedure, it is major oral surgery, neither had any trouble. Certainly not painful or in the way once the initial surgery wore off/healed. And yes, the surgeon installs a titanium post and a temporary crown. That has to heal before the final crown is installed. The process takes a few months.
If you have a gap in your teeth, missing a molar, then listen to your dentist. Leaving a gap will cause the other teeth to drift in an attempt to fill the gap. That causes all sorts of difficulties.
I had implants installed about twenty years ago, so anything I say other than in terms of longetivity of the implants may be out of date. (I lost all of my back-lower-right-teeth about ten years before that, and essentially replaced the lost teeth with two posts and a row of artificial teeth.) Note especially that implants were a fairly new procedure back when I had mine done, and the procedures involved may well have improved since.
I seem to recall some discomfort when they drilled into the bone to insert the screws, but nothing all that bad. Once the crown was installed it was just like I had my normal teeth back in again. No sensitivity to heat/cold, no issues with chewing, pain or discomfort. Definitely glad I had it done, and even if they failed tomorrow I’d have had twenty years of comfort and style.
I did have one issue last summer - the dentist discovered during my normal checkup that my crown was wobbling. They removed the crown and discovered that the screws had come loose and needed tightening. (At least in my case, the crown is attached to the posts with screws, with normal cavity-filling stuff over the top of the screws and up to the crown-level. Removing the crown consists of drilling out the cavity-filling stuff and unscrewing the crown from the posts - a completely painless procedure as there are no nerves anywhere near where the drilling occurs.)
Yes, folks, as hard as it is to believe, old SevenWood had a few screws loose in his head.
I had no idea they did implants 20 years ago but I have ignorance fought!!!
Okay- I had a post inserted about August last year. It was done instead of a crown over two teeth, one being the final tooth in my mouth on the upper side (hope I am not losing you with the technical side).
I had a check up and made sure all was okay before I went overseas for a few months. I did not want to be told in London or some horrendously expensive place “Cicero, we have a problem”.
Got home and all seems okay. Had to have some further sawing or such which was another $500.
I go next week for some x rays and then the “tooth” or whatever will be screwed in.
It is expensive and I will let you know how it all goes. It sure is taking longer than I thought it would.
I have one and I love it. It’s the little tooth between one of the front teeth and the eye tooth, so it’s pretty much front and center. I’ve never had any problems with it and the implant doesn’t register or convey hot and cold. As someone said above, it was much harder to recover from having my wisdom teeth taken out.
I will eventually need 6 other implants done. If they weren’t so dang expensive, I would have had them done a long time ago!
i had one in my lower right jaw after a badly-infected tooth went too far south to save. the extraction went fine, but i have dentist chair issues, so when it came time for the implant to go in, i opted for aesthesia because it is so damn noisy and unsettling to feel the OS drilling into your jaw.:eek:
the implant worked fine and i had only mild discomfort from it. i had a vicodan scrip but i ended up only using them for the first few days. after that, aspirin did the trick and only for about a week or so.
in my case, i had the implant for something like seven years when it abruptly failed - ie: became unconnected from the bone. no one is sure why it happened.
my personal suspicion is that i may have been grinding my teeth during a rather stressful period in my life, and the constant flexing broke it loose. i had to have it removed.
in any case, as soon as the jaw heals up, i have no qualms about having a new one put in.
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/off-topic hijack-y thing off, apologies to thread
I have an implant in the same place. I had mine done because I had a permanent tooth that never descended. Insurance at the time didn’t cover it so it cost about $3000 total. The first time they put in the post, it didn’t adhere to the bone correctly so the dentist scraped off some of the scar tissue that had formed and it adhered normally the second time around. The procedure wasn’t terribly uncomfortable, I was all numbed up and a little swollen for a day or two but it wasn’t bad at all. I didn’t need the pain medication they gave me. I treat the tooth like a normal one and it looks and feels great 5 years later.
Greatest thing since sliced bread. I’ve had an implant for my bottom left rear molar for about eight years and it’s been mostly unremarkable, which I mean as a good thing. In terms of total “bother,” it’s less than a root canal, though the whole process took the better part of a year, and when they actually installed the post, it took more than an hour. I think they’re probably more aggressive on the wait times these days, so it might be shorter than the ten months or so mine took. (Extract bad tooth, wait six months, wait several months for the jaw to fill in the hole, install post, wait two months, attach post.
The one problem I had was that the post came loose a few years ago, and they replaced some gizmo in it. It was a sort of shim or something that was tightened by inserting a wrench bit through a hole in the top center of the crown and tightening – it fastens the crown to the post very securely, and the hole in the crown was filled in with “stuff.” (Not sure what the stuff is). It hasn’t bothered me since.
So is it generally more painful when the bad tooth is pulled or when the implant is…implanted? I had my tooth pulled last September and I’m due to have the new tooth implanted in just a few weeks. And I already paid $400 for the tooth extraction and a bone graft on my jaw but I assume that the implant will be far more costly…?
