The gums in the mouth are always on the move… literally. The gum is made in the cells underneath and they grow and mature as the move to the surface. Once they reach the surface, the cells have degraded and flake off into the mouth. This protects the body by a continual regenerating of the gums and also pushing off foreign material on its surface.

The gums are always reactive to changes to the environment, by overgrowing, ulcerating, scarring, tumours, and unfortunately changing to form lesions of many diseases processes such as autoimmune diseases and cancer.

The gum does not waste time in reacting. When we place an implant in the bone , we can through a tissue punch making a hole in the gum, and then place a healing cap into the implant to stop the gum growing it. This saves us doing surgery later on, when we want to place the crown onto the implant. 

Occasionally, the healing cap unscrews and comes off. Remember, the gum is always moving. So, either the healing cap has been bumped and unscrews slightly, or the gum tightens around the healing cap and unscrews it. Once it is slightly loose, the gum grows under the healing cap to push it out, relentlessly. It’s on a mission and does not stop!

We then have to probe for the implant and carefully remove the tissue to allow the healing cap to be re-screwed back onto the implant. This implant can be quite a way under the gum level. We need to remove enough gum that we are not fighting it to place the healing cap back onto the implant. Otherwise, the gum will fight back and it will soon unscrew the healing cap again.