See How a Full-Mouth Reconstruction Can Help You Smile Again
Full mouth reconstruction is a complicated procedure. And I’m a little bit biased, but I’m gonna tell you that you should see a prosthodontist for a full mouth reconstruction. Now, why is that? Prosthodontists have three years of additional training to be able to deal with complex and interdisciplinary comprehensive care.
So, full mouth reconstruction, it’s like building a house. You’ve gotta have the foundations that are sound. Our foundations are made sound by our specialists, our periodontists to make sure that the gums are healthy, and then we build on top of that. We make teeth or veneers or crowns or whatever we need to to be able to reestablish the patient’s bite, the cosmetics, the function, and what have you.
Now, full mouth reconstruction has to be done in a predictable manner. I go back to beginning with the end in mind. So the first thing we do is we visualize the end result. We make sure that the teeth will fit in the patient’s face. We give the patient a preview. We give the patient a mock-up. And the patient stays in what we call cosmetic prototypes, or patients may know it as cosmetic temporary teeth.
When we put these cosmetic temporary teeth in the patient’s mouth, most patients think that these are the final teeth because they look so amazing. Now, the reason we use cosmetic temporary teeth, when we’re reconstructing the whole mouth, it’s not just about a static band.
We need to know how the patient functions, how their jaw moves. So we put them in these cosmetic temporary teeth so that they can go away, they can chew, they can bite, they can go through their normal functional processes. You know, their friends may say to them or their significant other may say, “Hey, the teeth need to be a little bit longer.” We can make cosmetic changes. Those cosmetic temporary teeth give us a lot of information, right? So then we can go to the final teeth predictably.
Now, what if we didn’t do that? Imagine we just, you know, prepared the teeth and we put the final teeth in two weeks. What happens if a firm tooth breaks? Why does that firm tooth break? It breaks because we didn’t know about the function of the patient. We didn’t go through that phase. We went through cosmetic temporary teeth to idealize the patient’s bite, to idealize the aesthetics, the cosmetics of the teeth.
So full mouth reconstruction, it is a complex procedure, but we make it very simple by breaking it into phases so that we can provide patients with a predictable, not just an aesthetic but a functional result.