Get Your Teeth’s Function Back!
In restorative dentistry, patients have many options today. If they’re missing several teeth in the back, obviously implants are one option. But we also have partial dentures and we also have fixed bridges. An advantage of a fixed bridge, say a person is missing one tooth and they do not, for whatever reason, want to have an implant in the area. We can easily put a fixed bridge in the area. One of the benefits of having to fix bridge is once we prepare the teeth, we can put a temporary bridge in that area so they can function and eat, and go around in public as normal.
Sometimes with an implant, we need to bury the implant and put some other type of temporary restorative structure in there, which is not as compliant as a fixed bridge is. Obviously implants have an advantage because people are able to floss in between them sometimes with fixed bridges the disadvantage might be that they’ve got a floss underneath them. However, the big advantage is the fixed bridge can be back within two weeks versus an implant, which may take four to five months. So these are one of the things.
Partial dentures are another aspect of restorative dentistry. When people are missing several teeth in upper and lower arches, and for whatever reason they choose to have a removable appliance, we can make a partial denture that will look good and feel good for them.
One of the nicest things today is the tooth colored clasps that we have. In the past it used to be a big piece of metal that circumvented around the tooth there and it looked horrible. Today we can make that so that people can eat and talk and go out in public and nobody will notice that they’ve got partial dentures.
In addition, if they want to combine implants with partial dentures, we can then have the implants have attachments to them that they just pop the partial denture up in there and it looks even better. So it gives them a very complete smile without the sometimes expense of having a lot of implants and a lot of fixed restorative done. It still allows them the ability if they want to change over later on to have implants and a fixed restorative done, to have that option as well.