Doctor Jerry Farrell on Dental Implants
Prior to implants, the only way of restoring the integrity of your bite and your smile was either removable—removable partial dentures or full dentures. And fully, a third to half of people wearing lower dentures don’t wear them, they don’t fit. So, implants allow us to put back supports in the bone in ways that are fantastically predictable. People now are doing hips and knees and there’s no discussion of whether it’s gonna work because with the advent of titanium, and the technology whereby bone osteo integrates and grows right onto the titanium, most of those studies were done in the mouth because of the ready access to bone.
So dental implants are around—worked out, not experimental. They don’t decay. We’re at the point where they’re a genuine tool and again, using them as the foundation for dental solutions or problems that people have, it’s beautiful. It’s something that we do every day. It’s painless. That, plus bone grafting techniques that sound scary but allow us to preserve bone in the loss of teeth—a little technicalbut important to knowbecause the bigger problems with implants are not whether they work, it’s what we inherit and where can we find places to put them. It’s a fantastic tool worked out, but if done under the umbrella of a big plan, it’s kind of a beautiful time. Dentistry’s got a lot of tools to help people at this stage of the game.