Warren, MI Dentist compares implants and bridges

Hi. I’m Dr. Gregory Apsey here in Warren, Michigan. Today, I’d like to talk a bit about the option of implants versus bridge work versus removable partial dentures. Implant dentistry is something that’s very much here to stay, and has really been very helpful to our patients in replacing missing teeth, even in certain situations where the teeth have been gone for many many years, implants are an option.

But I want to talk specifically about implants versus bridges. So first of all, if there’s a place in a person’s mouth where there are teeth missing or a tooth missing, underneath the gum tissue there’s bone. And what we find is that if the tooth has been lost and there’s nothing put back into the bone, there’s no implant put in, what happens over time is that bone just goes away. Just like if you break your arm, and don’t use it, the bone becomes smaller and smaller and the muscles become smaller and smaller. The same thing happens with the bone in the mouth. So unless you put an implant back in, or the teeth are there putting stresses on to the bone, the bone just goes away over time. So, we’re faced with, what do we do? What do we do when a person misses, when they lose teeth?

So, 1 option would be to put a bridge in. So, let’s just, I don’t really have a good example of a bridge to show you. But this is a patient who lost 2 teeth on this side, and 3 teeth over here. Now, in her case, really, there’s no way that we can put a bridge, a cemented bridge, on this side, unless we put implants in. So, in her mouth, we placed 3 implants on the 1 side and 2 on the other. And this is the sort of appliance that replaced those teeth. The bridge was made and actually will be cemented down over the implants. Actually these are implanted supported bridges. What is nice about this is that you notice that the teeth on either side, I’m having a little trouble, this is actually a wax bridge. Her actual bridge is in her mouth, but you notice that the teeth on either side were never touched. We didn’t have to do anything to them in order to give her her teeth back. So if we were to make a bridge in this case, we would need to cut down this tooth and cut down this tooth.

Well, if those teeth didn’t need to have crowns over them, if they weren’t broken down and needing a crown, then it’s kind of a sacrifice of good tooth structure to cut them down, to make a bridge, so we prefer to do implants instead, and that way, she ends up with, actually, in her case, she ended up with individual teeth. All of these were individual teeth. So that she can go in, floss between the teeth, and she doesn’t have to struggle with flossing under the bridge. If we were to put a bridge in this patient, okay, basically all, these four teeth would all be one unit, one piece that would slide over these two teeth. And that would be cemented into place. Now that works very well. It chews well. It’s comfortable. It looks aesthetic, but we’ve had to cut down 2 natural teeth on either side. And, in order to clean around it, the patient has to thread the floss underneath. And that’s extremely important that that gets done.

So the only other option would of been to make a removable partial denture with the metal framework. And though that works very well and a lot of people have them. It’s not as nice.

A lot of people don’t like that their teeth can move. So that’s why we use implants in this office. And that’s why we like that that’s a very important addition to our practice and it really helps our patients out. Implants can also be used to hold a denture in. So, if a patient is struggling to keep their denture in place, two implants, as few as two implants, can be placed, and the denture can can be made to fit over that. And the denture snaps into place and it’s actually quite snug and tight.

We also can replace just a single tooth with an implant, or as in this case, this is just an example of a patient who would have all of their teeth replaced on implants, so this is a denture. This was something that I did in a lab. I have a patient that I’ve done this for, but for privacy reasons, she wishes to be completely anonymous, so we cannot use any of her pictures, but, basically how this works is, on the day of the surgery, the 5 implants were placed, or 6 in this case, and on that same day, the teeth are going in. And, so we did this with a patient. So implant dentistry has many facets, and can help people in many different ways, but we think that it’s, here to stay because it’s really good technology. And it just helps us to do much more conservative dentistry and really bring our patients back to life.

Warren, MI Dentist compares implants and bridges

Thank you so much for listening. I’m Gregory Apsey here in Warren, Michigan. If you have further questions regarding implants and bridges, please give our office a call at (586) 573-7700.

Warren, MI Dentist compares implants and bridges