Well, let me tell you a little story here, okay. The Mayo Clinic did a study, it’s quite a few years ago now, but they have a dental department. A lot of people don’t think of Mayo Clinic for dental type stuff, but they have a dental department.
And they did a study on, I think it was about 1100 cases that they had restored with either implants or bridge work. And they found that bridge work had to be replaced on average every 14 years. So let’s just make up a figure, okay.
Let’s say that you spent $4,000 on that bridge, and 14 years later you have to replace the bridge. Well, it’s not going to be, you know, $4,000 is going to be adjusted for inflation and whatnot, more. Plus, the reason you had to replace it is there’s damage underneath, there’s decay underneath, there’s something going on.
So you may have other work that needs to be done on those teeth as well. Okay, they found that an implant, on the other hand, is going to last far longer than that. Nobody can say they’ll last forever.
That’s age-dependent for one thing, it’s care-dependent for another thing. I tend to look at them as, for somebody that’s over 40, I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have it for the rest of their life. But they could goof it up accidentally, you know.
I plan on my implant lasting forever, and I’ve had it for 15 years or 20 years maybe now. So if you look at the fact that, say, if that bridge cost $4,000 and the implant cost $5,000, and the implant’s going to last way longer than the bridge, and you don’t have to spend another, how many thousands of dollars on it, you paid a lot less for the implant in the long run. Plus, with a bridge, when you have a space here and you have two teeth, you have to trim those teeth down for that bridge to fit over.
So you’re doing work on two adjacent teeth in order to replace the missing one. Well, the problem with that is it can also cause some issues with those teeth that you just trimmed down. So if you have virgin teeth right there, you don’t really want to put a bridge in, you want to put an implant in, because you don’t touch either one of these two teeth.
If these two teeth have crowns, take the crowns off, put a bridge in. Or if there’s some reason why they need to have crowns anyway, then obviously a bridge would be the answer. So there’s, you know, there’s different ways to look at it, but economics is certainly something that’s important.
