Don’t Be Embarrassed: Dental Implants Are a Great Step

Taking care of your body is a good and noble venture. Preventing your own illness doesn’t just spare you pain and inconvenience. It also helps lower medical costs for everybody and frees up time and resources for people whose illnesses were not preventable. More than giving you a beautiful smile, dental implants have long-term benefits that can help keep you healthy and strong for decades to come. Dental implants are nothing to feel embarrassed about, and here’s why.

Dental Implants Are Good for Digestion

Since dental implants mimic the color, luster, and shape of natural teeth, they are often indistinguishable from the rest of your smile. Because they also mimic the function of the teeth they replace, they can allow patients to eat foods that were unchewable before. In fact, dental implants restore almost all a patient’s biting power. This can bring new variety to a patient’s diet. The body needs a wide diversity of foods. Some fibrous, crunchy foods are great for both nutrition and digestion, but can be hard to chew with missing teeth.

Dental Implants Are Good for Your Jaw

The jaw is great for conveying pride. Like the rest of the skeleton, it is made of living tissue with cells that divide and consume nutrients. As with the rest of the body, it requires exercise to stay strong. During the chewing process, teeth provide stimulation to the jawbone as they work against it in their sockets. This stress causes the bone cells in the jaw to consume nutrients and reproduce, reinforcing the jaw and keeping it strong and prominent.

When the teeth are lost, so is this stimulation. Without the pressure that comes with chewing, the jaw will begin to atrophy. This process begins soon after the loss of a single tooth, and, as the mass of the jawbone at the site diminishes, it can drag the neighboring teeth down with it, pulling them out of alignment and exposing them to injury. This can lead to the loss of more teeth and the process beginning again, eventually devastating the smile. The whole mouth can sink into the face, and the lips, deprived of an area to stretch across, will wrinkle.

Dental Implants Are Permanent & Cost-Effective

Dental implants are the golden standard in tooth restoration, and they can last for decades with proper care, allowing you to have a sense of pride in your smile. Given all the health problems tooth loss can cause, ignoring the issue will only mean you have to get more dental and medical care in the long run. This means setting up more dental appointments down the line, which takes up dentists’ time and resources that could have gone to other patients.

By consuming supply and increasing demand, the consequences of skipping dental implants can drive up healthcare costs and limit other people’s ability to seek their own dental treatments.

Far from anything shameful, keeping yourself in good health is a service to the whole community. By getting dental implants, you are making a positive investment in both your appearance and your future health, and staying healthy makes it easier for you to help others. It’s something to be proud of. Taking a few weeks for the procedure is far preferable to having missing teeth for the rest of your life.

About the Author

Dr. Ryan Johnson earned his Doctor of Dental Surgery at the University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine. He leads Jacksonville Dental Excellence to provide the best and most compassionate care to the community of his Florida city. His practice provides services in cosmetic dentistry, restorative dentistry, preventative dentistry, emergency dentistry, periodontal therapy, TMJ therapy, and dental implants. If you’re curious about getting dental implants, contact him online or dial (904) 895-4536.