Although for the vast majority of people who want to get dental implants, this now mainstream tooth replacement treatment is very straightforward, there area minority of cases where things are trickier. If so, that’s when it’s a good idea to make an appointment with Joe Bhat.
Joe Bhat is a dental surgeon with a long association with dental implants, both as a practitioner and as a teacher of other practitioners. Over 300 UK dentists refer their patients to him for dental implant surgery. Joe Bhat has successfully carried out more than 6,000 dental implant surgeries, ranging from the simple one crown implant to far more complex procedure involving jawbones that have suffered deterioration.
Maybe the patient didn’t go to their dentist quickly enough after losing a tooth or two and now they have to deal with a jaw that has started to resorb or their other teeth have shifted around in the jawbone, making it harder to get an implant in. Or perhaps, although they did see their dentist straight away, they didn’t get an A1 health rating on their jawbone, and now need to have treatments to build up the bone tissue.
The jawbone it is the one limiting factor in having dental implants. It’s no good just sticking in an implant; it has to be able to integrate with the bone. If it can’t, it will become loose and even fall out. In a healthy jawbone, the titanium implant catalyses the bone cells and blood vessels to grow all over the surface of the implant, holding it in place as securely as if it was a natural tooth root. This process is called osseoingration.
The problem is that jawbones start to dissolve themselves as soon as they are no longer being stimulated to renew by the tremors they receive through the tooth roots. A jawbone can lose as much as 25% of its size and density in the first year after a tooth loss. Leave it for long enough and implant surgery becomes like putting a metal screw into a piece of dry sponge and expecting it to stay in place.
