Dental implants take a while for you to heal as you’re building, but everyone can be a candidate for a dental implant. The only reason a dental implant fails is that you have to make sure the bite is not too heavy on it. And that’s the dentist’s job, not the person’s job at all. And so there’s really no other—we joke that dental implants are 99.99999% successful because there’s really only that 0.1% of the time where the bite is too heavy or the occlusion is too heavy or you have cement around the tooth that damages it.
Research supports this high success rate. Studies show that 90-95% has been reported as the success rate of implants over 10 years (Factors Affecting the Survival Rate of Dental Implants: A Retrospective Study – PMC), with proper placement and maintenance being key factors.
I don’t even do cemented implants. We do screw-retained so that we don’t have to deal with the cement being two things that can fail an implant. The bite and cement. Well, let’s take away one of those. Now, we only have one thing that can fail an implant, and that’s the bite. And I’m going to make sure I got it right. So, that’s the dentist’s job. You might have to wear a night guard to prevent your bite from being too heavy on it, but other than those things, an implant is extremely successful. It builds a tooth without the help of the other two teeth next to it.
What is the procedure like, what is the timeline for an implant? An implant—if you start with taking the failed tooth out, you have to take the tooth that broke and is no longer savable out. And when you do that, sometimes you do what’s called a bone graft. And you let that heal for three months. So you take the tooth out, pack some bone in there, and sew it up and let it heal. That’s three months.
And then you come along and you place an implant in, and that takes 30 minutes. It’s an easy procedure. And that has to heal and integrate into the bone for about three months. And then you come back and we use our cool scanner, which is a computer that takes pictures of your mouth. No longer putting that goopy stuff in your mouth. This is the way dentistry is moving and it’s wonderful. And so we scan you and we send that to a laboratory that makes your implant crown and they mail it back in like three or four days.
The three-month healing periods allow for osseointegration, where the implant fuses with your jawbone. This process typically takes 3-6 months, during which immature bone tissue forms around the implant and then undergoes bone remodeling to become strong, mature bone (Dental Implants Osseointegration Timeline Explained).
So you’ve got what—six months and a day or three or four days and that’s the procedure. Now a lot of people feel like if I’m starting off from the extraction of the tooth that’s a lot of time. It is, but six months to build a tooth without the help of any other teeth and not damage any other teeth is really worth it. And the success rate being 99.9% successful is amazing.
Most implant companies warranty their work, which is unusual in dentistry because before we couldn’t warranty work because we couldn’t slap a donut out of people’s hands and make sure that they’re not causing cavities. But guess what? Implants don’t get cavities. They don’t get decay. They’re not made of tooth structure—they’re made of either titanium or ceramic, whatever you prefer. But those two components can’t be attacked by bacteria in your mouth. So they’re successful.
The material properties are key to this durability. Ceramic zirconia implants accumulate less plaque and bacteria than metal implants, with their smooth surfaces preventing bacterial colonization and being highly corrosion-resistant (Zirconia Implant – Why Choose It? | Integrative Dental Solutions).
The beauty of dental implants is that they’re the closest thing we have to replicating your natural tooth. They’re a permanent solution that looks, feels, and functions just like a real tooth. And because they don’t decay, with proper care and the right bite alignment, they can truly last a lifetime. That’s why I’m so enthusiastic about them as a treatment option for missing teeth.
