Everyone’s heard of Dental Implants. But do you know the WHY of Dental Implants? Why a Dental Implant is the best way to replace your missing tooth? Why it’s important to replace that missing tooth?
Ok. Let’s start with the why. Everyone knows that our front teeth (incisors) are for incising (cutting into) our food, and our molars are for mauling (crushing and grinding) our food. Lose an incisor, and you have lost 1/4 of your ability to incise your food. And, even worse, it makes you look goofy! So most people who lose a front tooth will want it replaced pretty quickly. Otherwise, how do we maintain our appearances up to the levels of a George Clooney or a Julia Roberts?
But lose a back tooth? Who cares? No one sees it anyway. Well, this is where your dentist enters to tell you that after you lose a back tooth, the teeth around it will begin to move. The next door teeth will tilt into the space. The tooth that used to chew against the now-missing tooth will begin to drift out of the gum, looking for something to chew against. And slowly (without you noticing at the beginning) you begin to develop what we dentists call a “Malocclusion” or a “bad bite”.
So what, you ask? Over time these drifting teeth often begin to develop gum disease around them. They may come loose and need to be removed. Even worse, this backward drifting of your teeth will eventually cause your front teeth to spread apart, tip, and rotate to odd positions.
So replacing that missing tooth, even if you can’t see it now, is important to the health of the rest of your teeth, assuming you’d like to keep them.