Dental implants have become increasingly popular over the last few years, and for a number of very good reasons. However, it can still be somewhat difficult to find a Tampa Dentist who offers this service. The purpose of this article is to describe the differences between the services a Tampa Implant Dentist will provide versus the traditional treatments for the same dental conditions.
A dental implant is a permanent tooth replacement that is implanted into your jaw. Because it is lodged firmly in your jaw and protrudes from your gums just like a natural tooth, an onlooker will have no way of knowing whether a particular tooth is real or implanted. You can eat, brush, and floss with an implanted tooth exactly as you would with a natural tooth.
If you have ever had a dental bridge you will know that there is a good deal of extra work in maintaining the bridge than maintaining natural teeth. With bridgework, you must buy special stiff dental floss that you can thread underneath the bridge in order to remove any food particles that are stuck to the surrounding teeth. Even doing this regularly, it is inevitable that eventually some decay will overtake the surrounding teeth and the only solution will be to expand the bridge.
People with more extensive tooth loss or damage have traditionally been fitted for dentures. There are several problems with dentures. The first is that the shape of your mouth is not constant, but rather changes throughout the day. This means that there will only be a few times in a day when your dentures will be a “perfect fit.” Furthermore, the shape of your gums will shift more dramatically over longer time periods, meaning that expensive replacement dentures will become necessary.
Both dentures and dental bridges share the problem of jaw erosion. Over time, your body will realize that the jawbone section that previously supported teeth is no longer necessary, and the minerals from that section will be stripped away for utilization elsewhere in the body. The consequence is that the area of your mouth underneath the dentures or bridgework will become lower, changing the shape of your mouth and smile. With Tampa Bay dental implants, this problem does not take place because the implants are lodged inside the jaw just like natural teeth would be.
The only downsides to these marvels are the time it takes to put them in and the cost of dental implants. A Tampa Bay implant dentist must insert your dental implants in several phases. The first phase involved inserting a titanium base into your actual jawbone. Before anything else can be done, this base must be accepted by and integrated into the jaw, which takes several months. After this healing process is complete, there is a post to be inserted which will support the crown, and you will generally need to wait several weeks for this to heal before the crown is placed.
There is an alternate procedure, the “implant in an hour” in which the crown is placed immediately. However, after this procedure the patient must avoid normal chewing for several months until the implant is accepted into the jaw, making the risk of rejection much higher. Because these procedures are generally significantly more expensive than bridgework or dentures, a rejection by the jaw would cause a substantial financial loss in addition to psychological feelings of loss.
However, in the long run, a trip to the dental implant clinic will actually not cost you that much more than traditional solutions to tooth loss. And the major benefit of Tampa Bay Implant Dentistry is lower maintenance, longer lasting, and more natural-looking and feeling replacement teeth.