Page 30 - Southdown Dental Implant Book

Two: What is a Dental Implant? | 29 According to historical discoveries and carbon dating, people have been trying to place dental implants (or dental implant-like devices) into patients for 1,900 years! The problem was that bodies are designed to reject foreign objects that are put into them (for example, your body will reject a sliver, and push it out). This means that jawbones didn’t “fuse” naturally with the metals, porcelain (and even cattle teeth!) that people were trying to use as dental implant material over the course of history. However in 1950, someone accidentally discov- ered a metal that the human body will accept! A Swedish doctor was studying the way bone heals, and as part of his experimental research, he inserted a titanium chamber into the leg of a rabbit; this allowed him to study the animal’s bone marrow under a microscope. A few months later, he tried to remove the titanium from the bunny’s leg... but he couldn’t, 2. WHAT ARE DENTAL IMPLANTS MADE OF AND WHY?