What is Dental Implant?
A Dental Implant is an artificial tooth root typically made of titanium that is placed in the jawbone to support a replacement tooth or teeth in form of a crown (single tooth) or bridgework (Multiple teeth implant).
What are the Advantages of Dental Implants?
There are many advantages to dental implants, including:
- Improved Appearance: Dental implants look and feel like your own teeth and because they are designed to fuse with bone, they become permanent.
- Improved Speech: With poor-fitting dentures, the teeth can slip within the mouth causing you to mumble or slur your words.
Dental implants allow you to speak without the worry that teeth might slip. - Improved Comfort: Because they become part of you, implants eliminate the discomfort of removable dentures.
- Easier Eating: Sliding dentures can make chewing difficult. Dental implants function like your own teeth, allowing you to eat your favourite foods with confidence and without pain.
- Improved Self-esteem: Dental implants can give you back your smile and help you feel better about yourself.
- Improved Oral Health: Dental implants don’t require reducing other teeth, as a tooth-supported bridge does.
Because nearby teeth are not altered to support the implant, more of your own teeth are left intact, improving long-term oral health.
Individual implants also allow easier access between teeth, improving oral hygiene. - Durability: Implants are very durable and will last many years. With good care, many implants last a lifetime.
- Convenience: Removable dentures are just that; removable.
Dental implants eliminate the embarrassing inconvenience of removing dentures, as well as the need for messy adhesives to keep them in place.
Types of Dental Treatment
1. Root Canal Treatment (RCT)
The Root Canal is a treatment to repair and save a badly damaged or infected tooth instead of removing it.
The term “root canal” comes from cleaning the canals inside a tooth’s root. Decades ago, root canal treatments often were painful.
With dental advances and local anaesthetics, most people have little if any pain with a root canal. In fact, it’s probably more painful living with a decayed tooth. Root canal alternatives include extracting the damaged tooth and replacing it with a dental implant, bridge or removable partial denture.
2. Orthodontic Treatment
Orthodontic treatment is a way of straightening or moving teeth, to improve the appearance of the teeth and how they work.
Benefits:
- Closing wide gaps between the teeth.
- Aligning the tips of the teeth.
- Straightening crooked teeth.
- Improving speech or chewing ability.
- Boosting the long-term health of gums and teeth.
- Preventing long-term excessive wear or trauma of the teeth.
- Treating an improper bite.
3. Prosthodontic Treatment
This branch of dentistry deals with the restoration and maintenance of oral function by the replacement of missing teeth and other oral structures by artificial devices.
4. Oral Hygiene
It is a state or practice of keeping the mouth cavity in a healthy condition, as by a regular program of brushing and flossing the teeth combined with periodic examinations by a dentist.
5. Dentures
Dentures (also known as false teeth) are prosthetic devices constructed to replace missing teeth and are supported by the surrounding soft and hard tissues of the oral cavity.
Conventional dentures are removable (removable partial denture or complete denture).
However, there are many denture designs, some of which rely on bonding or clasping onto teeth or dental implants (fixed prosthodontics).
6. Periodontology
Periodontology or periodontics is the speciality of dentistry that studies supporting structures of teeth, as well as diseases and conditions that affect them.
The supporting tissues are known as the periodontium, which includes the gingiva (gums), alveolar bone, cementum, and the periodontal ligament.
7. Dental Surgery
Dental surgery is any of a number of medical procedures that involve artificially modifying dentition; in other words, surgery of the teeth, gums and jawbones.