Half My Dental Implants have Fallen Out

Posted by writeradmin

I had six dental implants placed; four on my bottom arch. Two more on the top. An additional two are supposed to be placed in a few months, also on my upper arch. I have already paid for everything related to the six implants and will have to pay for the final two before I have those placed. One of my concerns is that it has been less than a week and three of my dental implants have fallen out. Here are my questions. Should I be concerned about the remaining three? Should I delay the final two? Am I able to replace those implants? Is it reasonable to ask for a refund on the three that fell out?

Adam

Dear Adam,

I’m going to start with the last question first. A basic tenant of any dental work is that it stays in your mouth. For that reason alone you are perfectly within your rights to ask for a refund on the failed implants. However, I think you are going to need to ask for more than that. When your implants failed, they took bone structure with them. In order to replace the dental implants, you will need to have some bone grafting done in order to ensure there is enough structure there to support the implants. Instead of asking for a refund, I think you need to tell the dentist that you want him or her to pay for your dental implants to be replaced properly by the dentist of your choosing.

I am going to say right off the bat that this is not the best dentist to work on your dental implants. In most cases, dental implants have a 5% failure rate and that is on the high end for some. Even then, they often don’t fall right away. Instead, they generally fail in over a year or so. Your dentist has a 50% failure rate, plus they fell out in only a week’s time. This leads me to another one of your questions. You need to have the remainder of these implants looked at. I would not have much confidence that your implants would stay in place. They need to be examined.

Dental implants are an advanced procedure. You will need someone with advanced training in order to get them done correctly. My suggestion is you go to a highly skilled implant dentist and have them give you an idea of why the dental implants failed as well as a probable outcome of the remaining implants. That will give you an idea of what you are looking at.

This blog is brought to you by Arnold, MD. Dentist Dr. Meredith Esposito.