People experience frequent dreams of tooth loss and other oral catastrophes. A deep-seated, primal fear surrounds our intrinsic knowledge that we need teeth.
tooth replacement goes back a long way, as well. As far back as 2500 BCE, the Egyptians worked on putting the things back in our heads. Since then, dental science has produced a history of improvements.
Modern dental implants provide excellent strength and stability. Not quite better than the original home-grown units, but pretty good. Getting them installed involves a more rigorous process than other dental procedures.
This guide goes over everything you need to know when making decisions about implants.
Dental Implants Overview
It doesn’t take a particularly in-depth understanding of dentistry to make guesses at how something with the word ‘implant’ works.
The big questions remain though. Specifically, “How do dental implants work?” and “What are dental implants made of?” top the list.
Purpose
The point of implants is to replace missing teeth and also to shore up the remaining teeth.
If you’ve lost a permanent tooth in life, you understand how teeth tend to spread into the space offered.
This is the leading reason dentists work to remove several teeth over time. Wisdom teeth, along with premolars, get yanked to leave space for the other teeth to grow in, match up, and work well.
In antiquity, this gave us room to lose a few from natural sources and still have functional mouths.
When more teeth start coming out, implants restore the structure and prevent decay from spreading faster.
Materials
Materials used for implants need to fulfill several crucial tasks. They have to be strong enough to last, resistant to pitting and chipping, and free of decay and oxidizing elements.
To accomplish this taks, dentists devised a multi-part system. Implants consist of three major pieces.
- Post
- Abutment
- Crown
The post, a titanium screw, is placed in the hole where the root once was. This fuses with the bone and becomes a part of the jaw.
The abutment is an angular attachment that provides a connection to the post and grip for the crown. The materials of abutments range.
Finally, a gold, porcelain, or resin crown attaches to the abutment. Dentists form molds of compatible teeth (or your original tooth) to shape a crown.
Procedure
Like anything else in dental care, the dental implant procedure invokes a particular fear in some.
Dentists work with oral surgeons (not always different, but not the same thing) to start the process. Offices such as aspiresurgical.net do all the work in-house.
Getting a post placed is minor surgery. Depending on the office, it involves full anesthesia.
You need upwards of six months of healing after a post is placed. This gives the bone time to fuse with the screw.
After that, an abutment is placed into the hole at the gum line. The abutment gets tightened down and a crown fused on top.
The whole procedure only takes a few hours of work but months of healing for everything to be in place.
Smiles Abound
When a dentist completes a series of dental implants, you regain full use of your mouth. Unlike dentures and bridges, implants function the same as other teeth. No extra care needs to be taken of them.
Look into dental implants to improve your quality of life. They look great, work great, and go a long way to relieving those primal dreams.