History of Dental Implants

Video Transcript

"We'd like to talk a little about the dental implant history. And history for me is quite exciting and interesting. The fact that implants we can say has been around only for a few years but in reality implants have been around for thousands of years. It's just what you put in the mouth. We know George Washington had probably wooden teeth to ivory and you name it. In the Egyptian era and the Aztec era they found that they were placing in from little small rocks to little small bones and even gold pieces embedded into bone thinking that it would stick or bond. So implants really is anything that is a foreign object that we place in our jaw or in our mouth. And to the misfortune of those generations thousands of years ago or even to our father of our country they don't work too well because they just don't stay in there too well. Not knowing the science behind it. The real burst, so to say, of dental implants came in the 50's by the name of Dr. Brennemar. He's actually, he was a physician and he wanted to test to see how metal and bone, can they bond together. And the design now what we look at today of what he did was quite archaic but at that time of course it was phenomenal. The first thing he did he worked on a canine and he extracted a canines teeth and then placed implants in the canines jawbone and then refabricated these brand new teeth out of solid metal coming through the canines gum. It's just phenomenal. The picture when you look at it you think of that 007 JAW the guy who had all metal teeth but this one, was more ferocious, it had all these metal teeth with nice sharp points. So with that one experiment and many others of course, but mainly with that one experiment it proves that metal can bond, I mean the bone can bond to the metal. And so in that fact things started changing. And we realized that. But then how we were supposed to do it was really a learning curve. And not really knowing what type of metal bonds well. So we tried from everything. They had used from stainless steel to solid gold to finally titanium which is the metal of choice. Knowing that titanium if very compatible biologically with our body. So but they kind of had to go through that series of trial and error. But now the titanium even though it's medical grade there are many different grades. There are many different designs on them. So from the 50's to the 60's to the 70's that's what they were doing. They were just sticking these different kinds of metals in people?s mouths and some worked and most didn't and the dental profession people were looking at implantologists as quacks, as crazy, they were hurting patients. But the fact that because of what they were doing in these experiments really helped basically improve the technology and the hunger for making it better."