Of course I am hesitating if I should really publish this personal & unpleasant aspect of my life?
About 2 years ago I was looking for first hand reports prior to my own surgery and was not really satisfied, so now I finally decided to share the results of my own journey that has been quite successful so far: getting dental implants in Argentina!
I know there's quite some health tourism around the world, and I found some dental clinics just specialized on that: tourists. But I didn't come to Argentina for that reason, I came here for and in love of Tango Argentino.
Staying in Argentina for quite much longer than I had initially planned, I also had to go to dentists several times. As you will see on the X-Rays that were taken recently, just before my 3rd implant (bottom), as every person seem to have their own "weak point", while I am usually a healthy person, you now know what's mine. Hopefully the implants are just the endpoint of a decades long painful chain of complications that I don't even want to start with since some parts of it are a) hard to believe and b) I know there are many people who suffer much worse.
I know there are people who hardly take take care of their teeth and never have had severe problems or even a nerve inflammation and a root canal treatment in their life. And there are people like me, where admittedly childhood and younger adulthood toothcare could have been much better, but longterm economic challenges (existential pressure leading to nightly teeth grinding) as an independent business starter combined with some bad luck (a handbook of stories to tell) lead ultimately to more and more decay and repair of the repaired to the only perspective left in dental town: implants.
Hard facts:
- For the price of around 500-1000 USD each
- I have now 2 titanium implants
- with zirconium crowns on top
- which (according to live feedback and in my own eyes) look really really good, especially since the white zirconium dioxide material of the crowns make the smile of this 40+ yr old lad look a bit brighter than I had expected, ...
The costs can vary very much, of course, depending on the situation that the dentist will encounter in your mouth and jaw, materials and/or adding bone mass to your jaws may double the prices easily. If you travel to Argentina just for that you will have to add the trip of course, but Argentina has a lot to offer, while it must be said that you shouldn't come in a hurry or if you get easily scared or if you lack can't cope with improvisation ;)
Back to the teeth:
Here's a description "from pull to bite":
- 1: pull the old tooth, if there's still one (these costs must be added to the implant costs), possibly add fresh bone material
- 2: wait/heal 3-6 months, so that it can heal and build up new bone mass
- 3.1: the IMPLANT: drill hole, possibly add bone material if lacking, implant the titanium screw
- 3.2: close/sew up the gums, so the screw will disappear and gum will grow over it. It will just look like the spot where they pulled out the tooth, before they put the screw in.
- 4: wait/heal another 3-6 months
- 5: a cap will be placed on the screw which is the basis/seat for the crown.
- 6: an imprint of your mouth will be made, so that a suitable crown can be formed in the dental laboratory.
- 7: the zirconium crown will be set on top of the basis which sits on top of the titanium screw.
When I started I asked for procedure details and timetables, costs etc. - and I have to admit: in the end it took much more time than I had expected initially. Naively I had thought I might have to invest 2-3 session and a few eeks of time. I was mistaken: Also because I had read about different kinds of procedures with different kinds of techniques etc. - there are procedures, for example, that promise "everything in 1 day". But I have also heard of "all in one day"-procedures that finally let to the loss of the implants which I had desired in the beginning. Now, knowing the nature of the details, I can well understand that a long term procedure may be less attractive but it seems to make more sense, because it is much more of a clean build up, while the one-day solution is a more "loose" fast path gamble, while I admit that the idea of reducing the procedure time to a few days or less seems to be very attractive if high probability of success was given. There are also clinics that promise to implant many new teeth in one session, even under full anesthesia (narcosis). While one implant at a time is not as bad as it sounds, but a bit more intense than I imagined when it came to the implants of the upper jaw, since the drilling which makes space for the screw, will hammer quite strong against the skull. It's not pleasant. But the dentist allowed me to listen to an EOS-cryptotech podcast, so I was quite distracted. ;)
And I am very happy I made the decision to go for it.
Especially when I got to know people who were fearful and/or had bad experiences for reasons that I do now understand better.
Argentina is in the midst of another economic crisis - and I hope it is not going to get worse. Inflation is high, the traumatic memories from the economic crisis 2001 fire up fear of hyperinflation and people are suffering and many fear they will glide down the path towards "Venezuela" (which I think is improbable), but
Argentina and Venezuela, both, for some odd counter-intuitive reason, are also famous for their well developed medicine in certain areas which do not only mean bigger boobs, that seem to be quite the attraction.
While the free healthcare system provides a good and basic care the private healthcare sector is highly developed and sometimes, in some aspects even superior to what I know from European services. I had my implants all done in private institutions. First of all I didn't want to steal service from those who need it more, second I felt (and was right) that waiting times are naturally shorter and clinics are a bit better off in terms of technology and materials in the private sector, which has a price, which might be cheap depending where you come from,...
Argentina is a young and beautiful country, it is also highly corrupt and extreme, so somewhere in between low standards and beautyfully surprising highlights I had the lucky chance to restore my dental health in a way that I could not have paid in the US and not even in Western Europe as far as my subjective and limited research showed me.
There's lots of animated pictures out there, or gruesome videos of the surgery itself that a few months ago was even done by a dental robot in China(!). When I saw my X-ray this month before my next surgery, I was immediately thinking: wow, this is what I would have wanted to see during my researches to have a better understanding of what an implant could look like.
Zirconium dioxide @ wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirconium_dioxide
Titanium @ wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium
Frankly: breaking teeth can make you broke, the smallest bit adds steam:
LTC: LT7hfQnqHftDUzAUbWPv3RK4fx1SxzLRJ4
ETH: 0xe28aa6311d914f093a2b4d1862bb332f9503f50e
BTC: 17pFoAf7DUV8qLsPchU5KCAexMS1GCeNHw
( I wouldn't add this if it wasn't very "tight", at a later point i might be the giving hand myself again )
Maybe I could help you getting your teeth fixed in Argentina?
I speak English, German, Spanish and some French and I am currently living here for a few more months working as a language teacher, just an idea...