In the 1990s, a company called BASF ran a series of commercials with the tagline, “We don’t make a lot of the products you buy, we make a lot of the products you buy better.”
One commercial noted that they made airplanes lighter, dresses brighter, and carpets tougher.
We don’t know if BASF ever got involved in dental products. If they had, then they might have said something like, “We don’t make your dentures, we make your dentures more secure.”
If you have dentures, then we are pretty sure that you want to keep them in your mouth. At Holladay Dental Studio, we have just the way to do that — dental implants.
We help patients from as far away as Salt Lake City at our dentist office in Holladay, UT. If you are near us, we can help you, too.
What Else Is Missing, Besides Your Teeth?
In the United States, we’ve come to expect certain things. If you are a high school senior with crooked teeth, you’ll wear braces for a while.
If you are a senior citizen with no teeth, you’ll get dentures.
An estimated 35 million Americans are missing at least one arch of teeth, according to the American College of Prosthodontists.
But are dentures really enough?
Dentures may replace the appearance of your teeth, but they aren’t really the same as your natural teeth, are they?
One of the problems with dentures is that they can come loose. They could fall out when you are telling a joke, giving a speech, or sharing a story with your grandchildren.
And they can make eating more difficult. Taking a bite of an apple or corn on the cob could take your dentures with it. Trying to chew a bite of steak, chicken, or pork could become more like a chore.
A person with a full set of healthy teeth has a bite force between 200 and 250 pounds. By some estimates, someone with dentures can have a bite force closer to 50 pounds.
This would certainly explain the difficulty you may have while eating.
A Bite Force To Be Reckoned With
If you’ve had problems with your dentures, then you may have given up trying to eat certain foods.
You shouldn’t have to give up any foods that you enjoy, in our opinion. This is why we offer dental implants for our patients with missing teeth.
Implant-supported dentures are more like real teeth than you may realize.
In general, people with dental implants can expect their bite force to be comparable to what they had when they had all their natural teeth. This is after your mouth has healed from the placement surgery.
Some studies have found that patients with implant-supported dentures can regain up to 85 percent of their original bite force within a couple months after their procedure.
That’s 170 pounds compared to the 50 pounds of force that you may have with dentures alone. That makes a difference when your are trying to bite something crunchy, crispy, or chewy.
A Solid Foundation
Here is what you need to know if you are still trying to decide if dental implants are for you.
Most tooth replacements — dental crowns, bridges, and dentures — are meant to replace the crowns of your missing teeth.
Dental implants replace the roots of your teeth. Just as your roots anchored your teeth in your jaw, your dental implants will anchor your crown, bridge, or dentures in place.
Modern dental implants are made with titanium for a specific reason — osseointegration. This occurs with your bone bonds directly to another material.
Your body rejects many metals as foreign bodies. With titanium, the bone bonds directly to the metal as it heals, however.
By strategically placing implants in your jaw, they can be used to support a set of dentures. We offer two types of implant-retained dentures.
With bar-retained dentures, we connect the abutments of your implants to one another with a bar. Your dentures then snap onto the bar.
With ball-retained dentures, we place balls on the abutments of your implants. Your dentures have sockets that fit over these balls to hold them in place.
Want To Know More?
We don’t have space to answer every question you may have about dental implants in this post, but we welcome you to contact our dentist office in Holladay, UT if you would like to know more.
If you are ready to make an appointment at Holladay Dental Studio, then give us a call at 801-997-1137 or use our simple online form.