Fake Pink Gum Vs No Gums on Full Dental Implants

Fake Pink Gum Vs No Gums on Full Dental Implants! There is a tremendous difference between bridges for full mouth implants that have pink versus no pink gums. There is a lot of misinformation on this topic! This video will provide clarity to understand the difference between the two and why you have to carefully select which one is appropriate for each person.
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Video Transcription (lightly edited for easier readability)
There’s a lot of confusion for when we replace all teeth, whether we have a bridge like this that has just implants or whether we have a bridge like this that has teeth, gums, bone connected to the implant. Let’s go through the differences between the two.
In our mind, everybody would like to have a bridge like this, right? It’s smooth, it’s sleek. We refer to this as crown and bridge or FP-I, FP-I is the term for it. The other extreme is called FP-III, right? This has teeth, gums, and replaces bone as well. Let’s talk about the pros and cons. We’ll focus mostly on this because what we see out there is a lot of this, and a lot of my cases are like this for a very good reason.
This is FP-I restoration. You could see this particular bridge is supported by eight dental implants and it has no pink. These patients that have the ability to have this done usually have a lot more bone to work with. That’s number one. They haven’t lost gum or lip support. They haven’t had any gum disease to lose bone around their teeth. There’s adequate bone to place these implants into sockets without leveling the bone down or replacing any of this facial lip support.
You’ll find a lot of articles I’ve written on facial lip support. These types of bridges. The big downside are they’re more costly. They’re definitely harder to do. They require a lot more skill of the dentist provider to do this rather than to do this. These are both difficult to do, but one is a bit easier. These are also besides more challenging to do and requires a lot more skill in a much better lab.
It requires numerous visits, more temporaries and prototypes. Your existing teeth pretty much have to be in a good place to where the new teeth are going to be. If you have a very challenging bite or the teeth were in the wrong locations, this often doesn’t work. These are much weaker than the other types of bridges that have pink, the FP-III, because they’re not as sturdy, right? They’re just much thinner in general. They’re breakable.
The ways that we prevent breakage on these or reduce breakage is to design them to have their connectors as thick as possible on the inside, like the gum portion to segment them instead of making them a round horseshoe. Then we try to make them into smaller pieces. If a piece breaks, then you can replace that piece a little bit easier. That’s not always the easy thing to do to replace a broken piece.
In these types of bridges, the other long-term issue that can happen is the implants can lose bone easier on this type of bridge than it can on this type of bridge. This is because these implants are put in a more shallow position where the teeth used to be, where the gums and bone are more delicate. Some ways to reduce the chance of losing bone and gum are to have what’s called socket shield or root banking. Very fancy procedures in order to prevent the bone from being lost in just three to seven years.
Even though it looks great today, it may be terrible in a few years and completely redoing it to go to this phase. What I’m trying to say is very limited. Very few people fall into the ability to be able to do this. Very few patients are good candidates for it. There’s a lot of dentists who believe everybody can have this, and that’s very poor foresight. Maybe not a lot of experience. Haven’t seen cases over time, haven’t dealt with the problems and breakages and total implant loss that can happen on the FP-I bridge. They are definitely more delicate.
The thicker bridges, these are great for lip support, cleansability, this is much harder to clean. This is easier to clean. There’s less implants. This is less costly in general, unless we’re having to do zygomatic implants or pterygoid implants or something very special. But these are very cleansable because the surface is round. You can water pick in them very easily as opposed to tooth by tooth. You have to go through here and replace this.
This particular bridge has pterygoids on it. Those are special implants put into the back to help give adequate support. Big advantage are lip support, able to correct bites, midlines, facial support, everything. You have basically a clean slate to work with. And that’s where these bridges really shine. Also, the implants are placed much deeper on the FP-III than they are on the FP-I. And the deeper placement is in better bone that doesn’t tend to melt away.