If you’re missing your tooth, an implant should actually replace the missing tooth. An implant is basically a titanium screw and a fixture that actually goes into the bone. Dentists will fit a titanium screw into your bone, and this screw replaces the root of the existing tooth that’s extracted.
Let’s say you cracked a tooth or if you have gum disease and the tooth gets extracted. What do you do about it? We put a titanium screw in, and then on that titanium screw, we put this thing called the abutment -- it’s a screw within a screw. And when this locks in, we can then glue a tooth on it. This becomes a dental implant.
Now I also have to add what the options are if you don’t do a dental implant because I think that is a question people ask. Why should I invest my money or time? What are the options if you do not use a dental implant? If you do not have a dental implant, one of the options is to leave it alone. So we can actually just leave it as a space. But if we leave the area as a space, what would happen is that your teeth will start folding inwards and then your teeth will get crooked and you will not get a stable bite anymore.
The other problem with leaving it alone as a space is that the tooth on the top is supposed to be well-lined up, but if there’s nothing to support it at the bottom, what happens is that the tooth on top will actually grow into this gap. If you leave it for too long, in the future even if you want to get an implant, you’ll have two-level teeth and an implant that has to be set very low because the upper tooth has grown in. So that’s not such a good idea if we leave the space alone.
Another option is to actually cut the two teeth down at the adjacent areas and then glue on the fake tooth in the middle. This is called a dental bridge. But the disadvantage of a dental bridge is that you are actually compromising good teeth on the sides to hold this in place. The problem here is that with wear and tear, if you leave the dental bridge like this for maybe 10 to 15 years, if you knock it around, sometimes you can lose three teeth at the same time.
The beauty of having dental implants is that everything exists as an independent unit. If something happens to it, let’s say you bite down on something hard, they do not influence each other so much, and everything exists independently. I hope this is clear.
