If you’re 밤알바 worried about your teeth, you’ll have tried it at least once. As implants became more popular and more people planted implants, young people also actively considered them. However, since implants are not natural teeth, their advantages and disadvantages are bound to be clear.
What should I keep in mind if I am thinking about implant treatment. I asked Lee Sang-min (Good Life Dental Hospital), a dental counselor at Haidak. In three episodes, we will introduce the guidelines for implant treatment given by Director Lee Sang-min. In this episode, we compare the lost tooth treatments, bridges and dentures, with implants, and examine detailed procedures for implants.
Q. How did you treat your lost teeth before the implant came out?
Natural teeth are largely composed of tooth roots embedded in the bones and tooth heads that act as chewing and tearing. If you lose your natural teeth because of a cavity or because your teeth are shaking or splitting, you can’t chew and it’s not good to look at, right? At this time, if you make a tooth head again, you will be able to live as you used to.
If you lose your teeth, you can do bridge treatment. It is the most traditional recovery method that connects legs (bridges) by cutting healthy teeth on both sides of missing teeth to create a tooth head. But what if you don’t have healthy teeth on both sides? You can make a tooth head with dentures that you take away and wear. As such, in the past, there was no other way than to cut raw teeth or use dentures if you lost your teeth.
A bridge or denture can’t produce the root of a tooth, it’s just a way to make the head of the tooth. But there’s a really innovative treatment. A dental implant has been developed that fixes titanium metal columns, which can act as tooth roots, to bones, and makes tooth heads on top of them.
“Bridge vs. dentures vs. Implants”
Q. What are the advantages of implant procedures?
Comparing the treatment of the bridge, the treatment of the dentures, and the implants made by cutting the teeth on both sides, the features of the implants are clearly revealed.
Bridge treatment is like a healthy natural tooth standing a “joint guarantee” on the fate of a lost tooth, so in the worst case, three teeth may be lost after bridging to recover one lost tooth.
Needless to say, dentures with hard plastic on top of soft flesh are uncomfortable. In addition, if you chew on the right side with dentures on, the left side is lifted, and if you chew on the front teeth, the molar moves, so it is very difficult to chew. In addition, sensory cells that need to feel various flavors are distributed in the gums and roof of the mouth, and it is difficult to feel the taste properly because these cells are blocked with plastic.
To summarize the three advantages of implants, △ I can make a lost tooth alone △ Chewing power can be recovered similar to or in some cases greater than natural teeth △ You don’t have to wear dentures.
“First surgery (implant implantation) → bone adhesion process → Second surgery → prosthetic process”
Q. What is the implant procedure?
Many people think that a screw-type implant embedded in the gum bone is fixed like a nail in a wall. But that’s not the case. Implants literally go through the process of becoming one body with bones. This is called bone adhesion. In addition to mechanical retention, implants can also gain biochemical retention through bone adhesion to produce more chewing power than natural teeth.
The process of implantation is largely divided into two types: ‘construction procedure’ and ‘reinforcement process’. The implant procedure refers to the process of inserting an implant screw into the bone (alveolar bone) at the bottom of the gums. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, when implants were implanted in the alveolar bone, there were many cases where the implant was completely covered and buried with the gums. Surgery in which the gums are incised, the implant screw is planted, and then sutured with thread is also called “primary surgery.” After the first surgery, after 3 to 12 months of bone adhesion, a “second surgery” should be performed to connect the implant screw and the prosthesis to be mounted outside the gums.
After the implantation procedure, a prosthetic process is performed to make a tooth head on a firmly attached implant after passing through the bone adhesion process. You must have experienced modeling at the dentist using soft sword-like materials, and this process is necessary. Of course, in recent years, the process of taking thousands of pictures of teeth using oral scanners and making digital prosthetics with them is increasingly developing.
Q. You performed the first and second surgeries at the same time, and sometimes you finished them in a day?
Since the 2000s, “primary surgery” and “secondary surgery” have often been performed at once. It’s good to understand that the difference in surgical methods between dentists is not a difference in doctor’s skills, but a difference in philosophy.
If the first and second surgeries are performed separately, the probability of implant failure is greatly reduced, and extensive bone transplantation is possible, but there is a disadvantage of having to perform surgery twice. On the other hand, if you perform the first and second surgeries at once, you can perform only one operation, but the probability of implant failure increases.
Recently, in addition to the method of performing the first and second surgeries together, “Flapless or Flapless” is also used. This method of surgery should also be considered as one of the options to consider under various bone environments. It’s not something that reveals the difference in doctors’ skills.
“Is there a dentist who advertises that ‘all implant surgery is done with no incision or minimal incision’? If I were you, I wouldn’t be treated there.”
Q. How long is the implant procedure?
Both primary and secondary surgeries typically take 30 minutes to 1 hour. However, the total duration of treatment usually takes more than three months.
The long treatment period is because you have to wait for bone adhesion after completing the implantation procedure. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, bone adhesion was usually 6-12 months. Technology has been developed and is now reduced to two to three months. Some companies aggressively advertise that one month is enough for bone adhesion, but according to a proven safety paper, it is still recommended to wait two to three months.
The most important part of implant surgery and prosthetic processes is after implant prosthesis is made. This is because various problems can occur, such as food sticking and unused teeth hurting as you start chewing.
Surgery is easy in implant treatment. It’s easy to drill holes in bones and make prosthetics. However, it is difficult to make patients comfortably use implants and maintain them. Please remember that implants start to be treated after the prosthesis is released.