Denture Risks

Series Summary

Many people dread a trip to the dentist. They conjure images of themselves screaming and writhing in pain as an evil man in a white coat probes and pokes around their mouth. While this myth continues to haunt many of us, the dental industry has taken many steps to ensure that your next trip to the office will be a pleasant one. And, let's face it- no matter how much we may protest, there are still situations that arise that force us to go to the dentist office.

Loosing a tooth can be terrible. It can effect your eating and talking, and, of course, how you cosmetically look. However, fixing it can almost be worse. Bridges can damage your other teeth. Dentures seem like a horrid option. However, thanks to improvement in dental technology, a dental implant procedure is the perfect solution. In this free video series, Dr. Chen explains dental implants to you. Learn how dental implants are inserted in the jawbone. Also, learn the health factors and benefits of dental implants. He shows you the step by step process of dental implant surgery. He describes the post surgery healing and pain as well. So, take a moment and learn about dental implants today!

Video Transcript

"One of the reasons why we want to replace our missing tooth with a dental implant is, a major factor is, bone loss. Why the jaw bone is so important? When you look at older folks who have lost all their teeth, you can see how their lip line all sink inward. And that if someone who wears dentures, you see the fullness, but when they remove the denture, everything is sunk in. And the reason is because of bone loss. The bone, before, filled in all those spaces with the tooth, with the teeth, and when the teeth is lost, and then we start replacing with different types of prosthesis, and those prosthesis don't really maintain the bone structure. They just kind of fill in the space, so to say. And over time, we keep changing this prosthesis over and over again until there's really not much bone left in those areas. And one of the things you want to see is in this picture, where someone that wears a denture, you can see the two little holes. These are where the nerves comes through. And you can see there's a tremendous amount of bone loss like this. And as you look from the side, that's a lot of bone that's being eroded away, and this is just being conservative. Some patients, older patients, they've basically lost so much bone that when we take the x-ray, we look at it, it's paper thin. Literally, I can just take my finger and just go like that and I'll crack their bone. And that's why they can't bite hard. When they bite a little bit hard, there's just excruciating pain. And this is what you want to prevent. We don't want to - basically, we kind of say this jokingly, and it's not really a joke is that we don't want what our grandfather and our grandmother have. And with today's technology, we don't really need to go to that direction."