Alternatives to Dental Implants

Space is needed to straighten crooked teeth, to bring in protruding front teeth, and to solve many other common problems that affect the aesthetics of your smile.

As an alternative to dental implants, why not remove the rotten or damaged tooth and use that space to straighten the rest of the teeth? Our Orthodontic Team can use fixed braces or Invisalign to move the rest of your natural into the space. The rotten tooth is now REPLACED with a beautiful and healthy smile. That’s a win-win situation worth smiling about.

1. Avoid the responsibility of having to maintain an artificial replacement tooth for the rest of your life.
2. Save money! Braces as an alternative to dental implants, eliminates the need for replacing the bad tooth, therefore saving the cost of dental implants or dental bridges.
3. Avoid invasive dental procedures as dental implants that need surgical placement or tooth reduction to make dental bridges.
4. Take the opportunity to straighten your smile at the same time.

While the concept of leveraging the space created by removing the bad tooth to straighten your smile at the same time is a good idea, our Drs will also need to assess your facial and lip profile to ensure that your new smile is in harmony and enhances your facial features. Factors our Orthodontic Drs at MyBracesClinic consider before closing the extracted tooth space are:

• Facial profile
• Lip fullness
• Thickness of lips
• Amount of dental crowding/ crooked teeth
• Dental vs Facial midlines
• Quality of bone
• Age of patient
• Vertical height of the face
• Root health of adjacent teeth

A decayed or damaged tooth, once extracted, leaves an unsightly gap. Not only is this gap ugly and makes it difficult to chew, but it also allows side effects to snowball slowly over time.

Side effects from leaving an extracted tooth space alone over time:

1. The neighboring teeth drift, tip, and fall into the extraction space.
2. The dental center line drifts towards the extraction site.
3. Strange small spaces appear, trapping food and becoming more difficult to clean.
4. With multiple tooth loss, the bite collapses, the face shortens in height, prematurely ages, and the lips thin out.
5. Soon, there won’t be enough space for a replacement tooth of the correct size and shape to be placed, making treatment more complicated and costly.
6. Teeth serve to maintain the integrity of bone around it. The bone at the site of the lost tooth slowly disappears with time. This makes it difficult to place an implant to replace the missing teeth, as without bone, implant success drops.

The neighboring teeth are gently moved to the correct place with Invisalign or fixed braces so that a replacement tooth of the proper size and shape can be placed. This ensures better aesthetics and oral function.

With careful planning with our restorative dentists, our Orthodontic Team aims to minimize the number of replacement teeth for our patients. This creates a beautiful smile and reduces the cost of restorative dental work. Now that’s certainly worth smiling about!