This one is in the top three questions of patients looking for dental implants “are dental implants painful?” and so, the truth is that no not really and recovery from dental implant surgery is quite straightforward.

Having a tooth taken out is usually more uncomfortable and also the recovery can be much more painful however recovery from implant surgery tends to be quite easy. The procedure itself takes a little bit longer and they are longer appointments, but they are done under local anaesthetic and patients are made to feel as comfortable as possible. In bigger cases where surgery is going to last for a number of hours, we can offer sedation so that patients will be much more relaxed during the whole procedure, but pain wise it's easily controlled with local anaesthetic, the same kind of anaesthetic you'll have when having a filling.

Here at The Campbell Clinic, we do a large amount of research related to a variety of treatments and I’m currently doing my first little project; where I’m measuring how patients recover from implant surgery. I’m measuring how much pain they experience after implant surgery, how they cope with the pain, how much swelling and bruising they have, and I've also asked them to rate the recovery.

We are still in the early stages of the research and we are still collecting data but so far, from the first 16 patients 11 of them rated their recovery as easy or very easy and the remaining one as moderate and this takes into account all kinds of cases from single implants, multiple implants, grafting and non-grafting procedures and that shows us that, in general, patients recover very well from surgery.