How many trips to Portugal should be planned, and how far apart?

This is the first confusion to clear up, and the one that leads people to count too many tickets. The course of an implant is counted in appointments, not in journeys: two to three appointments, in the Instituto AreLuna’s description, an indicative number that depends on a prior individual assessment and diagnosis. Several of them fit into the same stay, a few days apart. What really makes it necessary to come back to Portugal is something else.

The cause is osseointegration: the time the bone takes to bond with the titanium. That time cannot be shortened by availability or by appointments: it is biology, and it happens far from the clinic. It is what splits the treatment into two stays. The timescales given here are those the Instituto AreLuna describes, and they too depend on a prior individual assessment and diagnosis.

The description of the treatment, in the Instituto AreLuna’s terms, is the replacement of a lost tooth with a titanium implant and a zirconia crown, planned from a 3D X-ray. The course has two parts separated by a wait: first the implant goes into the bone; once the osseointegration period has passed, which it puts at about three months, the visible tooth goes in. These timescales are indicative and depend on a prior individual assessment and diagnosis.

In between, nothing is scheduled in Portugal. The description is explicit on this point: osseointegration takes place at home, without appointments. For someone living in Luxembourg, that is the difference between a treatment you have to organise your life around and a treatment that takes up two stays several months apart.

For the surgery stay, the Instituto AreLuna states a minimum of three days on site: one for the assessment, one for the surgery, at least one to recover before flying home. For the second, the one for the final prosthesis, no duration is published. Both depend on a prior individual assessment and diagnosis, and anyone who has to set ticket dates confirms them before buying.

When what is being replaced is a whole arch, with a fixed prosthesis placed on four or six implants, the timetable changes shape without changing the count. The Instituto AreLuna describes the course as one surgery plus two to three follow-up appointments, and the protocol provides for a fixed provisional prosthesis within 24 to 72 hours when the CBCT assessment confirms the conditions for immediate loading. None of this is set before a prior individual assessment and diagnosis.

Everything hinges on the word ‘provisional’. The prosthesis that closes the gap in the first days is not the one that stays: the final one arrives three to four months later, according to the Instituto AreLuna’s description, and it is because of it that there is a second trip. Here again, the timescale is indicative, subject to what the prior individual assessment and diagnosis will show.

The two cases do not add up and do not mix: they are two separate timetables, with the same number of trips for different reasons. Asking how many trips are needed without saying which of the two applies gives an answer that does not allow a single ticket to be bought.

This count matters most to people who are not making the journey because of the treatment. Someone who lives in Luxembourg and comes to see family already has, in an ordinary year, more than two trips in mind. The practical question then becomes whether the trips already planned fall within the interval the treatment requires, or not.

That sum can only be closed with actual dates and after the examination. It starts with a call to +351 220 430 090 and ends with an assessment consultation at Rua de Júlio Dinis, 194, 4050-327 Porto, the address where the Instituto AreLuna provides dental care. The Instituto AreLuna is registered with the Entidade Reguladora da Saúde, the Portuguese health regulator, under number 161637, with operating licence 21593.