Discover All That Dentures Can Do for You
So dentures are our treatment modality, which are not really…it’s not really taught at dental school anymore. And the reason it’s not taught is they just don’t have enough time to teach dental students everything. So, fabricating dentures is a lost art form, right? It really requires a lot of understanding of tooth position, how the face should look, how the support of the lip should be.
There are so many things that go into fabricating a really nice denture for a patient. As specialists, as prosthodontists, this is part of what we do on a day-to-day basis, right? We’ve got seven, eight different techniques to fabricate a denture. Not every single patient has a denture fabricated by the same technique. The other advantage we have is that we have laboratory technicians that come and meet the patient, and we customize the tooth. It could be that the patients want their teeth crowded, they want their teeth to look like they used to look. We don’t want to provide a denture which is monotone, straight teeth, and it doesn’t look real.
When you look at a patient with a denture, it should look real. Nobody should be able to tell. Now, dentures have essentially stayed the same over the last, you know, hundreds of years, 100 years, should I say, and nothing has really changed in terms of technique and the way we do things until recently. More recently, we’ve adapted digital technologies to fabricate dentures. Now, what is the advantage of a digital denture for a patient? The first thing is fit. The fit of a digital denture is amazing. It really fits very, very well. And we have technologies through scanners, 3D printers, milling machines to be able to do that for patients.
The second advantage of fabricating a digital denture, this happens to a lot of patients. What happens if they lose their denture? They don’t have to panic. We don’t have to go through, you know, all those impressions and four, five visits so that they can get another denture. We just press a button and we mill another denture, and the patient gets that denture within 24 hours. How, you know, great is that from a patient perspective? So we do dentures very, very differently here at Anacapa Dental to individualize the experience with the patient and to customize the appearance, the fit, and to make sure that it looks great in the patient’s face.