Once upon a time, people were told that teeth were nothing but a burden and that the quicker they could be removed to be replaced with dentures, the better. If you speak to people during before the 1950s, it is likely that they had full dentures very early on in life, as this was their dentist’s advice.
Today, however, we know that with proper oral hygiene and dental care, there is no need to have teeth removed and dentures are becoming less and less common.
Those who do lose their own teeth for whatever reason often search for Clinton Maryland dental implants to replace the individual teeth. Some people have a full mouth of dental implants as well. But where did all this come from?
All about Dental Implants:
As dentistry has advanced over the past ten years or so, some fantastic technological developments have also been included. Today, people choose to have dental implants for missing or lost teeth. This is completed using proper surgical techniques and the success rates for these procedures today are about 95%.
In the early 1960s, orthopedic surgeon P.I. Branemark introduced the concept of fusing titanium with bone, a procedure also known as osseo integration. This concept was then adapted so it could be used in dentistry as well.
Unfortunately, it was seen as a very unpredictable and risky. At that time, the success rates were just between 55% and 60% and dentists felt this was too low to introduce as a standard procedure. However, manufacturers kept claiming the success rates were improving, which meant dentists continued to be interested. Eventually, after thousands of experiments, they developed a titanium dental implant that looked almost exactly like a human tooth root.
It took another 40 years approximately for dentists and specialists to use dental implants more colloquially and it is now a generally used type of treatment. Some ten years ago, the market for dental implants truly exploded, at which point the topographical surface of the fixture of the implant was changed.
They claimed that this further improved the success rates, but these claims were wholly unsubstantiated. These claims, it is believed, were made to win market share of the implant sales in the US. Some 85% to 95% of these shares are held by the major implant companies in this country, which some suggest is unfair competition.
Unfortunately, the research in the field of dental implants is still very poorly written and much of the dental literature includes false claims about success rates of this type of treatment improving.
What really happens is that if a manufacturer states they are noticing an improvement in their success rates by making small changes, other manufacturers immediately follow suit even though no clinical documentation or research exist. It is believed that this problem will never cease to exist.
At the same time, however, the fact that there is no real knowledge about actual success rates, what is known is that these implants work and that people are very happy with them.
