Dental Implant failed - surgical infection. Is it common?
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Personally, I would NEVER do implants, I'd rather have a mouthful of dentures.
I have a friend who went thru hell and back with an implant issue, lawsuit etc. Nope, not for this gal, life has too many pits to begin with.
In my experience, too many implants are done either haphazardly or by dentists not fully qualified to do so. But if done right, they are the best way to go.
Ive had 12... Never had a problem. Cant even tell the difference between the real ones and the implants.
I have an implant bridge in my lower jaw (two implants plus one pontic) I have had a few issues with one of the implants off and on, but it has been OK for quite a while now, in there tight and works well. I am grateful for this, because I would not have been able to chew on my left side - my lower bridge had failed (after 30 years) and broke off, taking the teeth with it.
Implants work best for healthy individuals who do NOT smoke, and who have good oral hygiene. They must be kept immaculately clean, or they can become infected and fail. Most people have no issues with them.
Every one of your doctors cares if articles are peer reviewed and you should too. A "peer reviewed" journal means that all articles are critiqued for scientific validity before they are published. An article is submitted to a journal for publication. The journal reviews the article to see if there are flaws in their methods, if their conclusions are actually supported by their data, and many other aspects of the scientific method I won't bore you with. I am a reviewer for 2 major journals and it's amazing how much crappy "science" gets submitted that we have to reject. This is basically a screening process to see if the research is valid and to weed out junk science. Without this type of critical review you get.....the internet....where anyone with $20 a month can say anything they want to regardless of if it's true or not. A scientific journal will be catalogued by the US National Library of Medicine and indexed by Medline/Pubmed or OVID. Not google.
My statements here are not my opinion. My statements are a summary of scientific research studies performed by people much smarter than me. I asked for peer-reviewed sources in my posts 19, 21, and 23 and I even gave examples in post #19. All I got was results from "googling" the topic.
Google indexes some excellent resources. Of particular use are those who take the primary sources and compile, filter and interpret them. An article on pubmed might be interesting, but it is nowhere near as useful as practice guidelines, cochrane reviews or, best of all, emedicine.medscape.com. Medscape articles can only be accessed through google.
After 9 weeks of implant surgery and about 6 weeks after the implant was removed, I went to another surgeon to have a look at how I am healing after implant removal.
He did a CAT scan and said that there are 2 issues.
(1) the outer wall to support the implant is not building up.
(2) The bone graft that was put has some gaps/empty pockets.
So we would have to re-do the bone graft.
it seems like not-only my implant surgery failed, the bone-graft surgery after the implant removal also failed?
feeling a little bummed out,
not sure what I could have done differently.
I don't think you could have done anything differently. You followed a conservative form of implant treatment (which I applaud). As one poster noted, the mouth is a veritable cesspool of bad bacteria and an implant is a highly invasive procedure. The success rate is probably over 95% and you ended up in the 5% or so unfortunately. The body and medicine are both imperfect and sometimes bad outcomes occur for no particular reason.
To followup on above 2 issue discovered after the CAT scan,
I showed CAT scan to another surgeon and he noticed 3rd issue,
There is a small piece of original tooth left behind after the extraction.
The surgeon said that, this piece must be removed else it might cause infection.
So I think I definitely need to redo the bone graft.
Is it common for original tooth to be left behind like this?
Is there any legal/consumer legal protection for such cases?
Difficult to know with the information presented if the tooth fragment is a concern or if it's related to the implant problems. Also, it can be difficult sometimes to know if something on the xray is a tooth fragment or a piece of native bone or a fragment of bone grafting material. Amazingly, there are tons of people walking around with tooth remnants that have no symptoms or problems. To know if this tooth fragment is a concern, it depends on the size, the exact location, how long it has been there, if the tooth was originally infected, what the bone immediately surrounding the implant looks like, and other factors.
This happens most commonly when removing teeth that have had previous root canals, because they are much more brittle and fracture into a million pieces when removed. When this happens, it is very difficult to look into a tiny bleeding hole and decide if you are looking at white tooth structure or white bone structure.
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