I think everyone here would like to hear about your experience with the dental implants and the rebuilding of your mandible. We haven't had that many postings on the topic, and though some of us are very familiar with the technology, your first-hand story would be interesting to everyone. I might add that dental implants can be restored in other ways besides screwed on porcelain teeth. For instance, some restorations use a 2 to 4 implant group with a metal bar attached between them. Then a denture with retention clips on the underside of it is used to fasten the denture to the bar. It can be removed for cleaning, is vey stable, and since an entire mandible of denture teeth can be set on top, is cost effective as resotorations go. There are also small balls that can be screwed on top of the implants, and in the denture base there is placed a small metal retainer with a silicone rubber o-ring in it that slips over the balls, and once past the height of contour holds the denture in place. This kind of restoration is used in younger patients, as the denture is partially supported by resting on the mandibular or maxillary ridge, but prevented from much lateral movement during chewing by the o ring/ball retention method. In some patients they even have used sub miniature neodynium cobalt magnets in the denture, and on top of the implant they place an iron containg alloy keeper that the denture is attracted to. There are a wide areiety of possibilities and these are mostly determined by the amount of bone there is to hold the implant (larger implants can take more loading than smaller ones) and whether or not the patient has any natural dentition left that a fixed porcelain to metal bridge might be attched to besides its attachemnt to the implants themselves. Fixed restorations must be hygienically maintained with meticulous care, as implants can be lost to periodontal disease just like natural teeth. Osteointegration of titanium into natural bone is an amazing thing, actually discovered by accident when a researcher named Branemark from Sweden, placed some small titanium tubes in rabbit femurs so that he could observe through them the activity in the marrow. After the animals were sacrificed at the end of the experiment, he found that the bone had grown to the titanium tubes in such a strong manner, that they could not be separated. This natural occurring phenomenon of osteointegration became the basis for many breakthroughs and made dental implants posssible. There is no rejection by the body of parts made from CP titanium or the most popular and strongest alloy of it Ti6Al4V, which mixes aluminum and vanadium with the titanium to overcome titanium's natural brittleness.