How Dental Implants Evolved Throughout The Years
Since ancient times, dental implants have helped humans in various ways. Some of the first civilizations would find aesthetic uses for implants, while others would use them to aid in eating. However, it was only in the 1700s that modern dental implants began to take shape, with alloys and sometimes gold being used. Image source: Wikipedia.org Fast forward a hundred years, towards the end of the 1800s, when the practice of putting porcelain crowns on top of platinum discs was first introduced. It was welcomed for a while until the human body showed signs of rejecting the invention, as the body would any artificial foreign object installed on it at the time. Several experts realized that for the implants to work, it needed to be fused to the bone through osseointegration . A lot of experiments were done and it took a lot of time. In 1952, an orthopedic surgeon named Branemark finally made the breakthrough. He discovered, albeit by accident, that it was titanium that