In what scenarios do people get immediate implants rather than waiting for a delayed one?

Doctor's Answer

I will be laying out two scenarios.

So for example, let's say you are involved in a road traffic accident, or maybe a sports accident or injury, and you lose your upper front four teeth.

Let's say it's very traumatic; your upper front four teeth are damaged and cracked beyond repair and you have to get them extracted. So, when we plan to extract the teeth, at the same time we will replace those four missing teeth with implants immediately with four plastic teeth.

So if you are sedated and you wake up, at least you have four teeth and you can smile and look normal. Otherwise, you might look pretty bad without your front four teeth. That's the first typical scenario.

The second typical scenario is for the older patient, where they have fewer teeth remaining and the area is already damaged. It might be loose because of, say, gum disease or decay and they are wearing removable dentures that they are not happy with.

So sometimes what we do for these older patients is that we actually extract all their remaining damaged, cracked, unhealthy teeth so that they don't have any teeth in their mouth whatsoever. Then we do a full mouth rehab with implants.

So we extract teeth and we immediately replace 4-6 implants at the top and maybe 4-6 implants on the bottom and we will join all these implants together with an implant fixed bridge which is like a series of teeth joined together by implants, and when the patient wakes up they wake up with a full set of teeth.

This concept is, in the dental faculty, called the "all on four concepts". That means you get all of your teeth back on four implants, sometimes it can be all on 4 implants or all on t6 implants, sometimes all on 8 implants it really depends on the case. So you get all your teeth back in a day on either 4,6 or 8 implants for the upper jaw as well as the lower jaw.

So that is another example of a fairly common immediate implant that we do in the office. That is for the older patients who already have teeth missing and whatever remaining teeth are damaged, diseased, and decayed, and the patients just want a brand new set of teeth.

So those are the two common cases where we present with our patients an immediate solution rather than a delayed solution.

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