Dental Implantation Discovered by Accident

How did people from early civilizations take care of their teeth? When a tooth was rotten or broken and subsequently taken out, it could only have been a painful process without the help of modern medicine and technology. What happened after the tooth was gone? According to evidence dating back to 600 AD, the Mayan civilization used rocks, stones and seashells to replace lost teeth. Surprisingly, some of these materials fused to the jawbone and provided the necessary tooth replacement they needed for chewing food.

We have come a long way when it comes to dental implants and dentures. A good candidate for implants can go through the entire process in three to six weeks, after which he will have perfect implants and dentures attached to them. As easy as the process may sound though, the technology of implanting roots to the jaws was discovered accidentally. It happened way back in 1952 when a surgeon failed to remove a small cylinder made of titanium – the same element used for roots to fuse with the bone – from the bones of his patient. He was studying how bones healed but ended up realizing how titanium fuses so naturally to the bones of a person. The rest, as they say, is history.

Dental implantation was much in use in the 1970s, and developments to the process are still being made until recently. Osseointegration is the term used to call the process of fusing dentures to the jawbone.