Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world are missing one, several or all of their teeth. Dental implants offer a permanent solution to missing teeth. A dental implant is a small titanium screw that is surgically placed in the upper or lower jawbone replacing the root of the missing tooth, providing an anchor for the new tooth.
Other than wisdom teeth, the remaining teeth are quite essential for a lifetime. The more teeth you can maintain in your mouth throughout a lifetime the more stable your bite is and the less hard the other teeth have to work. For example, if you have a job that requires ten people and you take away five the others have to work twice as hard, they will get fatigued twice as fast and get only half the job accomplished. It’s the same with teeth.
Because we are living longer, we are outliving our natural teeth. Teeth can fracture and break, bone around the teeth
can be lost and accidents can create trauma. With the success and predictability of dental implants, teeth can be replaced individually as they are lost without impacting the adjacent natural teeth. Nowadays dentists don’t have to destroy good tooth structure to place bridges or partial dentures. They can just replace what’s lost. The older traditional ways of replacing teeth were to employ the remaining teeth in some manner.
In the past, if all of your teeth were missing, artificial teeth called dentures would be fitted. If an individual tooth was missing, a partial denture would be clipped around the existing tooth. These were unattractive, cumbersome and totally unnatural. Functional for a while, but they accelerated the loss of the remaining teeth because they were making the existing teeth work harder.
Implants are a surgical reconstruction of only the site that has been damaged therefore more natural tooth structure is maintained and the natural teeth are prevented from being overloaded and lost prematurely. An implant is a small post made of biocompatible titanium that replaces the root of the tooth. It is anchored into the bone similar to the way a natural tooth is anchored.
Implants have many advantages in replacing missing teeth. Teeth fastened to implants feel more natural than conventional removable dentures, and unlike conventional cemented bridges, it is not necessary to grind healthy adjacent teeth to anchor the bridges. Implants also help maintain the bone that is normally lost after a tooth is lost. The sooner a missing tooth is replaced with an implant the less complex the reconstruction is. The bone starts to melt away after a tooth is lost and then there’s less bone available for anchoring the implant.
With advanced tools cosmetic and restorative work is created with such precision and attention to detail that the outcome is beautiful and completely natural looking in appearance.