If you are considering having dental implants in Chertsey, you are definitely on the right track. When you have a missing tooth, or missing teeth, dental implants are the nearest thing that you can get to the original tooth or teeth that you have lost.

If you stop to think about it, this makes total sense. There are other ways of replacing missing teeth, of course, perhaps the best-known being dentures. Until perhaps 40 years ago dentures, along with a bridge, were really the only way of replacing missing teeth. Let's look at a bridge first. This can only really replace one or two teeth - sometimes more – because it requires a healthy tooth on each side to support the bridge. Perhaps the worst aspect of a bridge is that it requires each of the two perfectly healthy teeth on each side to be cut down. Furthermore, if you are replacing two, three, or four teeth there is a definite strain on the supporting teeth. Not only that, but a bridge will only last for between 5 and 15 years, which means that it is going to have to be replaced when it has served its' time. The comment is that it is "not unusual" for a bridge to last over ten years.

Dentures? Well, these are a foreign object inserted into the mouth. Certainly, they can look very good, and they may fit fairly well for a time. However, dentures are notorious for slipping and sliding about when you are eating. Worse still, you can't put too much pressure on them, so forget about eating walnuts again.

Even worse is the fact that dentures can cause considerable embarrassment. As you grow older, they will not fit as well as they once did and it is not unknown for someone wearing dentures to throw back their head and laugh at a hilarious joke and find that the dentures fall out of their mouth. Seriously! It really doesn't get a lot more embarrassing than that.

Another thing about dentures is that you have to take them out overnight and put them in a glass with cleaning fluid in it. Which is also not a lot of fun. They can also affect your speech. Oral B, the toothbrush manufacturers, state as follows:

Bite and swallow before speaking. This places your dentures in position so you can speak more clearly.

Practice reading aloud.

Use a denture adhesive. Using a denture adhesive will help keep your dentures in place and make it easier to speak clearly.

They also say this:

When you speak, the sound reaches your ears through vibrations in the bones of the jaw and skull. Wearing dentures changes and increases the sound, but this is much more noticeable to you than to anyone else. If your dentures "click" when you speak, try to speak more slowly to avoid movements that raise and/or move your lower denture.

Keeping your lower denture in place requires the ability to hold it still with the muscles of your lips, cheeks, and tongue. At first, these muscles may tend to "kick out" your denture. With time and practice, you will be able to overcome the difficulties of speaking. (https://oralb.com/en-us/oral-health/life-stages/adults/eating-speaking-with-dentures).

With dental implants you have none of these problems. A dental implant is basically a screw made of titanium which is inserted into your jawbone. It can take several weeks, and up to six months, for the jawbone to go through the process of ossification, which is the term for the process of the jawbone growing around the implant so that it is firmly fixed, and in effect it becomes a part of your jawbone.

Once that process is complete, a crown to match the surrounding teeth is fixed to the implant, and hey presto! You have a new tooth. Or teeth. You can have several teeth fixed to four or five implants which can replace all the original teeth, and nobody will ever know that these beautiful white teeth and your engaging smile are not your own original teeth, unless you tell them.

And you're not going to do that, are you?!

This is why dental implants in Chertsey are the way forward for the 21st century.