Getting Dental Implants After Surviving Cancer Can Help You

Getting the diagnosis of any kind of cancer can be terribly upsetting. Fighting cancer can be a difficult road. The treatments can cause all kinds of side effects, including damage to your teeth, or even tooth loss. Once you finish fighting cancer, you may want to do what you can to repair that damage. You want to feel like you are getting back to your normal life after successfully fighting off the cancer. Getting dental implants to replace the damaged or missing teeth can help you get back to who you were before the cancer took over your life. 

Reasons to Get Dental Implants

There are several reasons that you should get dental implants after your cancer treatment has caused you to lose your teeth. 

• Bone loss: The loss of your teeth can cause the bones in your jaw to start to lose strength and even be resorbed into your body. The reason for this is that the bone needs to be stimulated in order to continue to be healthy. Your teeth do this. When you lose teeth, that socket will start to shrink and change the shape of your jaw. Implants can hold that space and start to stimulate that bone to grow again.
• Aesthetics: As your bone starts dissolving and resorbing into your body, it causes the some changes in the appearance. The shape of your lower face will change. Without those bones to support your skin and muscles, your cheeks can start to appear sunken, and your lower jaw will start to recede. That can lead to you feeling bad about your appearance. Coupling that with missing teeth can really cause you to have really poor self-esteem and make you want to isolate yourself. 
• Nutrition: This is one that most people don't think about. However, tooth damage or missing teeth can change the way you eat. You may start to avoid eating certain kinds of teeth because they cause your teeth to hurt. Missing teeth can mean that you miss out on eating a lot of foods because it's hard to chew. Getting dental implants to anchor new teeth or dentures can make it so that you can eat those foods again. That can help to improve your nutrition and increase your overall health. 

Fighting and surviving cancer means that you are strong and have undergone one of the worst things that can happen to a person. Putting your life back together afterwards can take a while. Having damaged or missing teeth can make you feel the loss of your previous loss even more keenly. Dental implants can help you to get back to something close to what you had before you had cancer. For more information, talk to a professional like Oral Surgery Center.