If you know much about dental implants on Long Island and elsewhere, then you can probably picture the basics in your mind: a titanium screw that drills directly into the bone arch where a tooth used to be, a cap on the screw to secure the tooth, and a porcelain crown that’s the same shape and slightly harder than the tooth it’s replacing. The titanium screw will bond to the bone and become very hard to remove afterward, and all you need to do to keep the crown clean is brush and floss regularly.

However, a dental implant like that can only replace one tooth at a time. You could get several implants at once if two or three originals need to come out, but getting a single implant for every tooth would be very expensive. That’s why you can get alternatives that don’t cost as much but still give you a much more secure bite than a set of dentures could offer.

Implant Bridge

An implant bridge is easy enough to understand. Instead of replacing each tooth with a screw and a crown, an implant dentist who has to replace several teeth in a row will add a screw to each side of the gap. At that point, the dentist can create the bridge to link both screws, and the bridge will replace three or four teeth. Dentists also use bridges to replace damaged teeth that still have their original roots, but if they aren’t available then getting dental implants on Long Island is a good idea.

Mini Implants

Mini dental implants are much smaller around than regular implants, and that’s because medical engineers designed them to anchor in the thinner bone arch of someone who lost all their original teeth months or years ago. Mini implants can attach to dentures, and so you won’t even need to replace them completely when you install them. Mini implants are less expensive per implant than a regular version.

The available dental implants on Long Island also include subperiosteal implants, and these implants use the jawbone below the bone arch to anchor the crown when the arch is too thin to support a regular implant. In all four cases, a dental implant can improve a person’s bite without adding too much effort in keeping them clean. Between that and the long-term effectiveness of the implant, it’s no wonder so many people are choosing to get dental implants instead of dentures.