Missing A Tooth? Why We Prefer Dental Implants

Hi, I’m Dr. Grey Kantor. And I’m Dr. Ezra Kantor. And together we are… Kantor & Kantor… Dentistry for Healthy Living.

Of the possibilities of restoring a missing tooth, we favor the implant. The other possibilities, a removable bridge needs clips around the adjacent teeth and it needs to extend to the other side of the mouth, it creates a spider-like metal base that is a food trap. Patients often dislike this and are looking to replace it with something else which is usually one of the next two choices, which is a fixed bridge which would involve putting crowns on the teeth adjacent to the space. This traumatizes the adjacent teeth and creates a prosthesis which when and if it fails down 10, 20, 30 years has to be replaced as three units again or very frequently one of the abutments is lost, so it tends to expand.

The implant, again, the modality we favor, just replaces the tooth in that particular missing area and doesn’t involve the adjacent teeth and doesn’t involve a prosthesis that extends all around the mouth, is isolated to this one spot. It involves placing this titanium alloy implant into the bone which integrates with it and then adding the superstructure which is this head and crown about three to four months down the line. It is treated like a normal tooth, nothing has to be removed, no special techniques have to be employed to clean underneath the false teeth as it would be with a fixed bridge, it stands on its own and basically becomes part of the dentition, undetectable by the senses of the person in whom it’s installed. And frequently and most of the time, it’s aesthetically invisible to anybody who sees it and that’s why we favor it.