Have you decided to transition from traditional dentures to implant dentures? Congratulations! You’re about to start enjoying life with the complete, confident, and fully functional smile you deserve. Implant dentures look, feel, and act much more like natural teeth since they rebuild missing teeth from the roots up. While this means they require a longer healing period, you can typically expect a much shorter and easier adjustment period than you would with traditional dentures. Read on to learn more about what you can expect when adjusting to implant dentures in Estero.
Recovering from Dental Implant Surgery
When it comes to comparing adjusting to traditional dentures and adjusting to implant dentures, there’s no getting around the fact that implant dentures require more time. First, dental implants need to be placed in your jaw via a minor surgery. Recovering from the placement surgery itself will only take a few days, but before you can have your new denture placed, you need to wait for the implants to fuse with your jawbone. This process is called osseointegration, and it can take anywhere between three and six months.
What to Expect When Adjusting to Implant Dentures
However, once osseointegration is complete and your new denture is anchored in place, you’ll enjoy a far easier and shorter adjustment period than you would with traditional dentures! Here are a few things you can expect:
- Adjusting to eating with implant dentures: With both implant dentures and traditional dentures, you should start by eating soft foods and moving on to harder and crunchier foods as you feel that you’re ready to do so. While getting used to eating with dentures can take a month or longer, the stability of your implant dentures will help you adjust to eating much faster!
- Adjusting to speaking with implant dentures: When adjusting to traditional dentures, relearning to speak clearly can take quite some time and practice. On the other hand, you can count on your implant dentures to stay firmly in place while you talk. Most patients don’t need any extra time to adjust to speaking with their implant dentures!
- Adjusting to day-to-day life with implant dentures: Overall, since implant dentures are designed to look and function just like home-grown teeth, they should feel very natural inside your mouth from the get-go. After about a month of having them, many patients sometimes forget that their implant dentures aren’t natural teeth!
Adjusting to implant dentures is much easier and intuitive than getting used to traditional dentures. If you have any questions or concerns as you start experiencing life with your implant dentures, don’t hesitate to contact your dentist and they’ll be happy to help.
About the Practice
At Smile Rejuvenations of Southwest Florida, we’re proud to offer optimal oral healthcare services for the families of Estero and the surrounding communities. Our team of highly trained dental professionals provides a wide range of services right here in-office, including start-to-finish dental implant treatment. From your initial implant denture consultation to adjusting to your brand-new smile, our team will be with you every step of the way when you choose to rebuild your smile with dental implants. To learn more, we can be contacted online or at (239) 300-2767.