Five Common Problems With Dental Implants And What To Do Next

Dental implants help restore your smile, your ability to speak clearly, and your ability to chew your food. However, getting dental implants is a major surgical procedure. You should be prepared for complications, even when your dentist says that the risks are low. (That way, if you have no complications or complaints at all, you can feel really good about your procedure.) Of those who experience post-surgical dental implant problems, the vast majority fall into the following categories.

Pain

Without a doubt, you will have pain. The dentist is drilling into your jaw to insert screws. Pain is an expected outcome of this process. However, if pain relievers do not help, and your pain does not subside after a week or if it gets increasingly worse, you need to go back to your dentist immediately. Additionally, if your pain is accompanied by a fever, which is often a sign of infection, you need to see your dentist right away.

Swelling That Does Not Subside

Swelling is also expected for this procedure. However, swelling that does not go down after a few days is a problem. It could indicate a broken jaw bone, which could easily happen after the procedure and not during it. It could also indicate inflammation due to infection. Both are cause for concern. A simple x-ray can reveal any broken bones, as well as how they were broken.

Bleeding in the Surgical Sites

Your dentist has to sew up the gum tissue around your implants. Stitches are out within a week or two, but you do have to monitor the sites carefully and clean them as your dentist instructs. If your stitches come loose, or if your surgical sites start bleeding again or if they are bleeding a lot, that is cause for concern. The rest of the time, a little blood from these areas is not a big deal.

Implants That Feel Loose

Under NO circumstances should your dental implants ever feel loose, and definitely not right after surgery! Almost every dentist that performs this procedure checks all of the implants to make sure they were implanted correctly. If something feels loose, there is another problem with the implant that should not exist. You need to report to your dentist as soon as possible about your problem so that he/she can resolve it before it becomes a bigger problem.

Natural Teeth Are Loose or Shifting

This leans toward the end of the more extreme issues with post-surgical dental implants. Many implants are placed in between or alongside your natural teeth. Every attempt is made to prevent damage to your natural teeth. However, once in a rare while, an implant may be a tight fit, and when it is, your body responds by trying to push the real tooth out of the way for the new fake tooth.

Since you do not want to lose any more real teeth, the dentist has to make adjustments to the implant to make it fit better. This may include unscrewing the implant to shave it down a bit, and/or using a bridge crown to push the teeth back in alignment until the implant(s) has rooted itself firmly into the correct position and the natural tooth stops trying to edge out and away.

It Will All Pass

As difficult as one or more of these complications may seem, the truth is that they pass very quickly. The sooner you address any of these complications as they arise, the quicker your dentist can resolve them so you can heal properly. After about a month, you will not even know that you ever had any post-surgical problems at all. To learn more about dental implants, check out websites like http://www.2smileabout.com.

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