How long does the bone take to bond with the implant?

Bonding, or sticking, is the word everyone uses, and it fits. The clinical name for what happens is different — osseointegration — and it designates the period during which the bone and the titanium implant become a stable whole. It is this period, and not anybody’s diary, that governs the timetable of the treatment.

That is why implant treatment almost always has two separate moments, months apart. First the surgery, where the implant is placed. Then an interval during which, seen from the outside, nothing happens. Only at the end does the visible piece come in, the one you chew with.

It is that middle interval that surprises those who arrive with the idea of settling everything in a week. It is neither administrative slowness nor a place in a queue: it is biological time, and it is counted in months.

For the single implant, the course published by the Instituto AreLuna is two to three appointments and about three months of osseointegration. For the rehabilitation with a fixed prosthesis, the clinic states that the final prosthesis is placed three to four months after the surgery. These are indicative timescales from the clinic, and the timetable of a particular case depends on a prior individual assessment and diagnosis.

These figures are better read for what they are: an order of magnitude for organising your life, not a date entered in the diary of whoever is reading. The person writing a page has not seen anyone’s bone, and no text can anticipate what an examination will show about a particular jaw.

That is why this page puts forward no timescales shorter than those stated by the clinic, and does not present them as a minimum. A shortened figure on a health page reads like a promise, and a promise is exactly what cannot appear there.

According to the description by the Instituto AreLuna itself, the osseointegration period takes place at home, without an appointment. Someone operated on in Portugal who lives in France spends those months in their normal life, with no intermediate journey planned for it.

This has a practical consequence for anyone counting days off work: what takes time in Portugal is the journeys, not the wait. The wait happens anywhere, because it is not something you do — it is something that happens.

And that is also why this page offers no way of shortening the interval. The timetable follows the time of the bone; what can alter that time in a particular case is for the practitioner to assess with the examinations in front of them, not for a text written for everyone.

In practice, the treatment is spread over two journeys to Portugal — the one for the surgery and the one for the final prosthesis — separated by the osseointegration interval. Those are two absences to plan for, several months apart, and it is the detail that weighs most heavily in the organisation.

How many days each of these journeys takes is another question, answered with the treatment plan in front of you, not by estimate. This page gives only the interval between the two, which is the part that cannot be negotiated with anybody.

For the person waiting, these months are unremarkable. It is the part of the treatment in which there is nothing to do except follow the instructions left in writing at the end of the surgery, and book the second appointment with enough margin not to do it in a rush.