The 3 main benefits of dental implants are:
- The ability to not disturb the adjacent teeth.
The biggest advantage of placing an implant would be the fact that when placing that particular implant the dentist would not have to remove any tooth structure from any of the other adjacent teeth. So, in effect your teeth would remain as virgin teeth and just the space would be filled with one tooth. However, when you’re doing a bridge, you have to adjust the tooth in front and the tooth behind, take an impression, then place a bridge over those two teeth that were prepared with a dummy tooth in the center area. So, that is the biggest advantage.
- The ability to replace multiple teeth without a removable device.
Another advantage of placing implants, and we’re talking about multiple implants, would be to have an implant denture or a fixed prosthetic device over a number of implants when a patient has no teeth. So, given the choice between fixed and something removable, it’s always better obviously to do fixed if you can. That’s a very big advantage.
- The ability to keep the implant clean.
If you have a single tooth that you are replacing with a dental implant, then you would floss that area, just like you would floss any other area of your mouth, because you would have contact between the implant and the two adjacent teeth. However, when you have a fixed bridge in your mouth, you have to get floss threaders and place the floss threader over the pontic area or the dummy tooth area to make sure that area is clean because that dummy tooth just sits on the gum tissue and is not connected to anything.
