If you suffer from missing back teeth, it may not affect the look of your smile, but it can have serious other effects. Your back teeth are the ones that you use to chew foods such as a rare fillet steak, for instance (very nice!) but if they are not there, it can cause you a problem.
However, it is not just the problem of your smile or eating. When you lose a tooth, the jawbone can begin to melt away, and this can cause problems with the structure of your mouth and with other teeth. Those other teeth can then also become loose, and the next thing is that you lose those as well.
Now there are different ways of replacing bad teeth. If you only have one tooth missing, it can be replaced by a bridge. Unfortunately, this procedure requires the two teeth on either side of the missing one to be cut down in order to support the bridge. It does seem rather strange to cut down two perfectly good teeth to replace one missing tooth.
Dentures vs. Dental Implants
Of course, another answer is dentures to replace bad teeth. However, these have several disadvantages. To begin with, the jawbone where the tooth or teeth are missing will still continue to melt away and apart from any other consideration, this can make your face look older than you really are. Dentures can feel uncomfortable and can even be painful. As the bone continues to dissolve, the dentures can start to become loose and that means that they can actually fall out if you laugh at a joke or cough, if you don’t use adhesives.
With dentures, you still won’t be able to eat some foods such as nuts, steak, apples, and so on. They can also make you feel less confident, and quite a lot of people with dentures also suffer from bad breath.
However, today we are in the 21st century, and we have 21st century answers. Those answers are dental implants to replace bad teeth. They work by implanting a titanium screw into your jawbone. Over a period of some weeks the jawbone will actually bond with the implant so that it becomes much the same as the original tooth root. Instead of the jawbone wearing away, it is much the same as if the original tooth was in place.
The crown is then fixed to the implant and – lo and behold – you have a perfect new tooth, or teeth. They look exactly the same as the original teeth did, or maybe even better, and they function in the same way. You can laugh at a joke safe in the knowledge that they are not going to fall out, and you can eat anything that you want.
Now that really is the 21st century way to replace missing teeth.
