Advice to help our Woking patients maintain healthy and long lasting tooth replacements.
Dental implants are becoming widely known and more people are turning to them when they have lost teeth, rather than opting for more traditional dentures. There are many reasons for this; one being the strength and stability that implants offer, along with the fact that they can last for twenty years or more providing that they are looked after correctly.
This is an important aspect of dental implant placement. Although the procedure itself is a complex one that requires specific dental skills to carry out, much of the success is down to how the patient takes care of their implants, especially (but not exclusively) in the period shortly after the procedure.
In today’s Synergy Parkside dental practice blog, we are going to take a look at the various stages of teeth implant aftercare.
Initial aftercare
As you would expect after any invasive procedure such as this, there will be some soreness and discomfort in the area where the implant has been placed. This should be manageable through the use of your regular painkillers and should only last a short time. If you feel that any discomfort persists too long or becomes too severe, you should contact our Woking dentists as soon as possible for further advice. In the vast majority of cases, recovery is relatively straightforward, but care at this stage is very important, as it is for the duration of the osseointegration period where the implant and the bone in which it has been placed, fuse together.
Naturally, the implant is at its most vulnerable at this stage and care should be taken not to put any pressure on the new implant. This includes not touching it or poking it with your finger and not eating hard foods. In fact, for a short period, we advise liquid foods only, building up to softer, semi-solid foods such as mashed potato. Over time, you will be able to re-introduce harder foods back into your diet.
Cleaning is essential at this stage as well but you won’t be able to brush the implant with a toothbrush, and care should be taken not to ‘catch’ it when you are brushing the teeth around it. We will provide full cleaning instructions when you have your treatment, but generally, cleaning an implant means tipping, and not swilling aggressively, a warm saline solution over the area to prevent infection.
Especially at this stage, care should be taken not to do any physical activity that may have a ‘jarring’ effect. This includes activities such as jogging or jumping around, e.g. tennis or squash. It should go without saying that any contact sports should be avoided as well.