Your teeth? Who can tell?
When you look at some people with dentures, you can tell those aren’t their real teeth. Sometimes the tops of the dentures are not in line with the rest of the teeth. Sometimes, the denture clicks, or you see the person moving their teeth around. Sometimes they are too perfect and white and even to be real teeth in a person that age.
Now you need to replace some teeth. How are you going to do it? Are you going to go down the denture route? Or maybe you are thinking about fixed bridgework? Or perhaps you are more inclined toward dental implants.
All 3 methods of replacing teeth have their pros and cons, but, when it comes to looking after the rest of your teeth and the health of your jaws and gums, at Orpington Dental Care in Orpington, we think that dental implants tick more boxes.
About your jaw
One of the things that ages people is a shrunken jawbone. The bone loses size and density, and, eventually the chin seems to be closer to the tip of the nose. This is what people draw when they want to do cartoons of witches: the big nose, the pointy chin. It’s not actually old age that causes that look, it’s lack of teeth.
Without your teeth, your jawbone starts to dissolve itself, thinking it is no longer needed because there are no vibrations coming down through the roots to tell it otherwise.
Dental implants are the only way to replace lost tooth roots and prevent this from happening.
The rest of your teeth
It’s not a good idea to live with gaps for too long as the surrounding teeth can start to tip into the gap and eventually fall out. However, if you replace the lost teeth with fixed bridgework, it will require the loss of 2 more teeth, one on either side of the gap. These have to be ground down into pegs onto which buttress crowns for the bridge are fitted. With dental implants, the crowns are anchored into the jaw on their own posts, so there’s no need to sacrifice healthy teeth.
To find out more, why not come in for a consultation?
Lugging around your amalgam fillings is like lugging around the evidence of a misspent youth that everyone gets to see every time you open your mouth to have a good yawn or a big loud laugh.
Come the spring, you can be forgiven if your teeth are showing the stains of all those mulled spicy drinks, those hot berry-apple crumbles, those heavy tomato-based stews. All these things leave tiny traces of themselves as surface stains on your tooth enamel.
Plaque never stops and neither should you
They all commented at some point or other on the power of his wonderful, white smile, hammering home the message to millions of Strictly fans that your smile is just as important as your other messages.
Most people are aware of the link between smoking and cancer, and because of the increase in mouth cancer incidents we offer you information and support as you cut down or stop smoking altogether.
Fixed braces
Does the idea of wearing metal braces make you cringe?
Straighter teeth are easier to clean. With fewer irregular gaps in between teeth, such as you find with crooked, crowded and gapped ones, it’s easier for brush and floss to do their work. And, it also means that there are fewer nooks and crannies for plaque and bacteria to build up in, meaning you are less likely to develop tooth decay and need extensive and expensive tooth repairs and restorations later in life.
Dental phobia ranges from a reluctance to book an appointment to a full-blown panic attack when sitting in the dentist’s chair. If you are somewhere on this spectrum, then maintaining your teeth is no laughing matter. It could mean that you haven’t had your teeth checked for years, which in turn makes it more likely that you will need work done. If, when you do bring yourself to the dental practice it turns out you need a tooth replacing with, for example, dental implant surgery, that’s only going to send your phobia back into the stratosphere. So, what’s the answer?