Dentures

topsales

I have been on here before moaning about my dentures:still not happy with them but paid £4000 for removal of teeth and dentures! I can't afford any more.. would an NHS dentist be happy to take me on as a patient and sort out my denture problems?

brook2jack

A nhs dentist would be happy to take you on and make a set of dentures.

However since you have had difficulties getting used to the two sets you had made previously after wearing temporaries as you had had your remaining teeth extracted it is going to be very difficult , if not impossible , to sort your denture problems out.

As discussed before dentures are a substitute for having no teeth and not a replacement for your own teeth. They are big and bulky and require your muscles to adjust to wearing them.

What I would do is take the temporary dentures that you were most comfortable with along as well as the sets you were not happy with and hopefully they can copy some of the temporary dentures features.

However any dentist worth their salt will tell any patient coming in with several sets of unsuccessful dentures they cannot guarantee that the set they make will be any better. Certainly if you are hoping dentures will make you look less severe then you have to accept they will be bulkier and more of a mouthful than your temporary set.

If you could save up an implant supported set of dentures would probably sort out many of your problems if you were medically suitable but this is a private solution only.

Toothsmith

Agree with Brook.

Whenever I get a new patient for dentures, the first thing I try and do is completely destroy any expectation that the set of dentures that I'm about to make will be anything but the most uncomfortable, most difficult to wear, unstable, bits of plastic that they've ever had!!!

At least for the first few weeks.

Then, once their mouth begins to adapt, things might just improve a little.

They are, after all, just two lumps of plastic. They have no 'magic' and when balanced on a waggley jaw bone, with a tongue flopping about on one side, cheeks and lips flapping about on the other, and hunks of food mashing about in the middle - it's more of a miracle that anyone ever manages to hold them in place and get them to function at all!

Having said that, there is quite a skill in getting the bite right, and in a place where the jaw 'expects' it to be. Also, setting the teeth up so that they are working in balance is very important. This isn't the magic bullet that would suddenly make a denture 'work' though.

The thing you have to get straight in your head is that a set of dentures will not adapt to the way you used to eat. They won't 'learn' how your mouth moves and acquire the skill of staying in place whilst you eat. You have to adapt how you eat so that you can do it whilst managing the dentures.

It's like a bike - people can't just get on and ride one. They have to learn how to balance, whilst moving their legs round and round whilst keeping it going in the right direction. If you fall off, you don't go back to the shop and get another bike! Also, if you fall off, getting a £5000 bike instead of a £100 one isn't going to make the difference!

Once you can ride one though, you can tell the difference between a cheap one and a good one.

Stick with it, and keep trying.

Good luck.

topsales

Many thanks to both of you! It is really the bottom set which bother me - I still have 2 teeth (which now seem huge) to anchor them but my lips seem ' severe' ie the lower lip seems to have vanished! It is very noticeable - not just to me. The two bottom teeth (canines?) are much higher than the rest of my teeth - very embarrassing.

brook2jack

Lower dentures are always a problem, they never have the suction a top set have, that's why it's so important to keep what teeth you have left as they help to anchor the denture.

The problem is as gum disease progresses quite often teeth move and gums shrink. After teeth are removed gums shrink even more making a bottom denture particularly hard to control. So you have two competing problems, trying to control teeth and trying to make teeth look good and it can be difficult and sometimes impossible to achieve both to someone's complete satisfaction particularly with lower teeth.

Toothsmith

If you're still in the first couple of years since you had teeth out, then the gum will have changed at its fastest rate.

Might it be that the gum has shrunk down and the dentures dropped with it leaving the natural teeth looking longer now?

It seems that the problems you're describing are more aesthetic than functional. These should be able to be addressed relatively easily.

Go back and raise them with your dentist, and see what can be done..