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

‘Gluing’ is the word everyone uses, and it fits. The clinical name for what happens is another — osseointegration — and it designates the period during which the bone and the titanium implant come to form a stable whole. It is that period which sets the timetable of the treatment, and no diary has a say.

Hence the fact that treatment with implants almost always has two moments separated by months. First there is the surgery, which puts the implant in place. Then an interval during which, seen from outside, nothing happens. The visible part, the one you chew with, arrives only at the end.

It is that middle interval which surprises anyone arriving with the idea of settling everything during a week's holiday. It is not administrative slowness or a place in a queue: it is biological time, and it is counted in months.

For a single implant, the course published by the Instituto AreLuna is two to three appointments and about three months of osseointegration. For rehabilitation with a fixed prosthesis, the establishment places the fitting of the final prosthesis three to four months after the surgery. These durations are indicative, and the timetable for each person depends on a prior individual assessment and diagnosis.

They should be read for what they are: an order of magnitude for organising one's life, not a date written into the reader's diary. Nobody writes a page having seen the bone of its reader, and no text gets ahead of what an examination will say about a given jaw.

This page therefore puts forward no timescale shorter than those stated by the establishment, and does not present them as a minimum. A shortened figure on a health page reads as a promise, and that is exactly what cannot appear on it.

According to the Instituto AreLuna's description, the osseointegration period is spent at home, without appointments. For someone living in French-speaking Switzerland, those months pass in ordinary life, with no intermediate journey planned for the purpose.

This has a budgetary consequence, and it counts for more here than elsewhere: because basic insurance does not cover dental care in practice, every additional journey is an entirely personal expense. The wait costs nothing — it is the return trips that cost, and the interval requires none.

In practice, the treatment is therefore spread over two stays in Portugal — the one for the surgery and the one for the final prosthesis — separated by the osseointegration interval. How many days each of these stays takes is another question, answered with the treatment plan in front of you and not by estimate.