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If you’re going to lose a tooth there are options. So one would be a bridge. And that’s something that’s fixed in place. But if you have two healthy teeth on either side of that space, they’re going to have to cut the teeth down.
And then there’s what we call a 3-minute bridge. So the teeth are fused together. You can’t floss in between there like you used to do with your individual teeth. So a lot of those patients will develop a cavity later. And they’re going to lose one of those anchor teeth that originally was a healthy tooth.
Putting an implant in the position where the missing tooth is or the tooth that we’re going to take out allows them to function normally, they can clean around that, we’re not damaging healthy teeth. Many times, we’re able to do that at the time we take the tooth out. So that helps preserve the bone and the gum and really make it look like a natural tooth. So once the crown’s on there, they kind of forget it’s an implant.
So if you’re coming in and you’re having a tooth removed, we’re able to utilize that space, we have to modify it slightly for the implant to replace the root. And that’s really what an implant is, it’s kind of like a bionic root that we use to put the tooth on.
For someone who the tooth has been missing, we actually prepare a socket. The implant threads into that socket. And that, again, is able to provide an anchor for the permanent tooth.