Smoking, Vaping, Marijuana and Dental Implants

The topic today is smoking and dental implants. Well, do you have to stop smoking to have a dental implant? Can I smoke the night of having an implant? These are all questions that I've been asked numerous times over and over. So, the bottom line, let's just clear the air, for sure with a hundred percent, smoking affects the healing of all surgeries, whether you're having spinal fusion in your back or dental implant procedure or any type of medical procedure, it slows down healing because it decreases the amount of oxygen that goes to your cells, which in general, just make them heal poorly. We need our immune system and our healing ability to be at a hundred percent in order to have an implant heal, implant has to integrate to your bone. And a lot of things have to go right.
Kind of like if you think about a pregnant woman that's drinking alcohol during the first trimester, a lot can go wrong, we can kind of poison the baby, which would not be a good thing, and really can end up with some terrible consequences. So, think of the implant especially in its first four to six weeks of healing, that a lot has to go right for it to work. Smokers, besides all the things you know have an increased risk for heart and lung problems and there's issues with sedation, being put under or moderately sedated, there's things where you're breathing while we're sedating you is not as good as somebody who's a non-smoker. But obviously it causes a lot of preventable diseases, but in general, broken bones just take longer to heal.
So, if you go to the doctor with a broken arm and you have all put back together with a screws and everything else, and an orthopedic surgeon, they're going to tell you the same thing, nicotine affects bone healing. And nicotine in any form, so we're talking about e-cigarettes, the JUUL, vaping, any of those types of things. In fact, e-cigarettes may be worse than regular smoking. In the last 10 years, I've actually seen worse case scenarios with patients that have quit smoking, but gone to e-cigarettes, thinking that it's healthier, it's not the case at all. Besides poor wound healing, poor wound healing leads to infection. So, we see a lot more postoperative infection in patients that are smokers, which then leads to pain. They get pain, they get bone exposed, so we want to reduce smoking as much as possible.
Honestly, the bigger the procedure, so a lot of what I do is full mouth dental implants, we take out all the teeth, put all the implants in the same day. You leave with great looking teeth within 24 hours. And then sometimes it takes zygomatic implants, pterygoid implants, special implants to make it all work. But smoking has a bigger effect on the bigger procedures. Not that it's not going to affect a one tooth implant, but there's a bigger difference when you have to open up the gums, this big versus this big, but regardless, I don't want you to smoke with a single tooth implant or full mouth dental implants. And also they're called other we call comorbidities. That means if you smoke and have diabetes and have high blood pressure and have issues with your immune system or take prednisone or have diabetes, those things, they all add up.
And they're not necessarily one plus one plus one, it's exponential in how much risk it can become when you smoke. Let's say somebody who's a heavy smoker and they also drink heavily, well, the drinking causes heavy bleeding in interactions with medications and also slows down healing, then just add smoking to the mix and it makes it worse. So, I mean, if you want to have a successful procedure, you got to be part of the team. The same reasons why you might be losing your teeth right now if you think about it, you probably have bone loss, pocketing, periodontal disease, gum disease, all the same thing. Gum disease number one cause is smoking, smoking and poor dental hygiene. So, you can either smoke or you can have teeth, but you can't have both. Either way, it's going to catch up with you.
And with dental implants, even after you have them, let's say it's successful, I quit smoking, then you start again, well, then you just end up losing bone and gum on the new implants. So, implants aren't forever, right? They don't last forever. I've got an article written on that as well. So, we want to get things to last as long as possible, so we have to make some lifestyle changes, some soul searching, self-reflection to make sure that we are really... If we want teeth and a great smile and for things to work out, it's going to take some work on your part to get it there. But regardless, again, I'm on your team. I'm not trying to take away all the fun and make life to be where you can't do anything at all. But it's real important, the success of your dental implant surgery, the short success and longevity with the implants is also really important, so quit smoking now. Right? That's going to increase your success for a great outcome.