Missing teeth do more than just knock your confidence about smiling or laughing in public; they can affect your diet, your general health, and even your ability to speak clearly. At our Marylebone dental practice, implant dentist Dr David Madruga Gonzalez has helped many patients who have experienced tooth loss to get both health and confidence back with the help of dental implants.
Why you should replace missing teeth
You should always replace missing teeth because to do otherwise risks your dental and general health. Remaining teeth have a tendency to move into any gaps, becoming crooked in the process. This makes them more difficult to keep clean, increasing the chances of oral health problems such as gum disease.
Depending on how many missing teeth you have, you may also find that your ability to eat a healthy and balanced diet is affected, as you could find yourself limited to a soft-food or even liquid diet, making maintaining adequate nutrition far more difficult. Your speech can also be encumbered, and your confidence is likely to take a bashing.
Why implants are often the best treatment for missing teeth
Dental implants offer your dentist a permanent way to replace lost teeth. At our Marylebone clinic we can replace one, some, or even all of your teeth with a combination of implants and restorations including crowns and bridges.
Implants are, effectively, bionic tooth roots. Made from titanium, they are placed directly in your jaw bone in a small operation, carried out by experienced implant surgeon Dr Madruga Gonzalez here at our Marylebone practice.
The implants form a strong bond with your jaw bone, providing a very strong anchor on to which your replacement teeth can be attached. Depending on how many missing teeth you have, this may be a bridge, a crown, or implant-supported dentures.



Our teeth are made up of two parts – crowns and roots. Traditional dentures and bridges replace only the crown portion of a tooth, but
Teeth can be lost for a variety of reasons. Health problems such as tooth decay and gum disease are a common cause of tooth loss, while as the population ages many people are finding that they lose teeth as they get older. Accidents and injuries can also cause teeth to be knocked out, and while it is sometimes possible for your dentist to reimplant teeth lost this way in the socket, sometimes a tooth replacement is required.
Dental implant surgery can be relatively quick depending on the number of implants required and, contrary to popular belief, most people who undergo dental implant surgery feel no pain at all. Modern day dentistry is no longer about large needles and painful drilling. Instead carefully monitored and controlled sedation techniques keep the patient in a relaxed and care-free state, while most patients who undergo conscious sedation have no recollection of the surgery a all.
According to the study, people who had experienced tooth loss were reluctant to leave their home, and tended to be disappointed in themselves for requiring dentures. In the UK, more than two million people have lost all their teeth in either their upper or lower jaw, and even though this study implies this loss can be just as damaging as having a long-term health condition, it is often not taken very seriously.
Lured by anecdotal evidence of high standards of care, professional looking websites and budget airlines undercutting each other to get cheaper flights to Europe, it’s no wonder that ‘dental tourism’ is big business. Unfortunately many people have returned from such trips with problems arising from initially shoddy treatment. Such is the scale of the problem that it’s caused the General Dental Council (GDC) to issue a set of guidelines for anyone contemplating getting cheap dental treatment abroad. The guidelines encourage the potential patient to ask some important questions such as…
Our principal dentist, Dr David Madruga, is highly experienced in the use of conscious sedation to help patients who are afraid of the dentist. Dr Madruga leads a highly-experienced team in the field of conscious sedation, and he welcomes referrals from other dentists to our Marylebone practice if they believe their patients would benefit from treatment under conscious sedation.
While once a full arch of dentures was the only solution, dental implants now offer an increasingly popular alternative. Implants have several benefits in such circumstances: they offer a solution that is predictable, safe and – with proper aftercare – long-lasting.
Here, we look at why dental implants are often the perfect solution to missing teeth.
Dental implants