What is the difference between an implant and a crown?
Dental implants provide an effective treatment for replacing missing teeth. Since Brånemark’s pioneering work in the 1960s, millions of titanium implants have been manufactured and placed in patients, with reports indicating that their number will continue to increase year after year.
This increase is due to the growing trend among us, Dentists, to recommend **the placement of dental implants to improve our patients’ quality of life in terms of aesthetics, chewing, and long-term stability**.
One of the biggest questions when discussing implants is understanding the difference between an implant and a crown.
Let’s try to explain this difference in a simple way.
**Implants serve as a fixed replacement for the tooth root, meaning they are the part that remains embedded in the bone and is not visible to the naked eye—only through X-rays.**
**The crown is the visible part that replaces the natural tooth crown in terms of aesthetics and chewing—essentially, the white part.** When a tooth is missing and we want to restore it, the crown requires the support of the implant.
To make an analogy with something from our daily lives, imagine a painting screwed to a wall. The screw that goes into the wall provides support (in this case, the implant) for the painting that attaches to the screw (the crown).
Does that make sense?
