How Dental Implants Are Changing Lives

Dental implants are basically described as artificial tooth replacements

, that are inserted into toothless parts of the mouth to resemble (and nowadays to actually function as) the lost teeth.

While widespread usage of dental implants is a relatively new phenomenon, one which really caught on in the last three or so decades, the idea that artificial replacements to human teeth could be employed goes back several millennia, with archeological evidence suggesting the use of such implants in the ancient Maya civilizations, for instance.

A major breakthrough in dentistry, which made possible the use of dental-implants that not only resembled the lost teeth (for aesthetic appeal), but also worked like the lost teeth (for functional appeal) was the discovery, by Swedish a dentist called Branemark, that titanium-made dental implants could be fused with the jaw to such a good extent that the titanium made dental implants came to be, for all purposes and intents, part of the living tissue in the mouth.

A lot of other developments have taken place in the dental prosthetics fields (where dental implants are made) since Branemark's work that led to the discovery of the 'fully-integratable' titanium made dental implants. In the meantime, use of dental implants has been changing lives of people who get to use them for better in many ways.

One of the ways through which dental-implants have been changing lives for better is by opening up social frontiers to people who had be cocooned into shells by their tooth loss (especially where it happened earlier in their lives). These people, once they can raise the money required to make the dental implants, will typically go into a prosthetic dentist's surgery, stay there for a few hours (dental-implants can nowadays be done on an outpatient basis) - and come out with their social frontiers expanded greatly. From a theoretical point of view, one may not understand just how great a change the 'acquisition of teeth' can make in a person's life. But from a practical point of view, anyone aware of how much of an image conscious society we have evolved into, a society where people who don't 'fit' are treated most cruelly, the impact that dental implants can have on people's lives would be too great to put into words. This is especially the case where the teeth being implanted happen to be the 'front teeth' whose absence can be so greatly conspicuous.

Through dental-implants, car crash (and other accident) victims who wake up from a comma only to realize that they have lost their teeth can still live with some hope that they will come out of the hospital with 'some form of teeth' at least - which can lessen the impact of the accident on them; so that while they are dealing with the physical pain of the accident, at least they don't have to deal with the emotional pain of having to live without teeth, which would have aggravated the pain of the accident many times fold. Before the advent of dental implants, this realization that one would have to live the rest of their lives without teeth was usually one of the factor's that led to lose of 'will to live' often with tragic results.

by: James Maloney

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