Four Steps to Perfect Dentures Your Denture Plan
Clinical Denture Centre offers a no-obligation half-hour consultation for all patients. Our Clinical Dental Technician will discuss every aspect of your dentures with you – the look, the feel and of course, the cost! The process after this will be tailored to your individual requirements, so it may be that you skip one of the visits, or perhaps need to repeat one, but in general, the average process from initial consultation to you walking away with your new dentures might look like this:
Consultation/Impression
This consultation is the start of a process of providing a unique and individual denture plan aimed at providing each patient with dentures that have the ultimate comfort and look that only an experienced Clinical Dental Technician can achieve. In general, the process will take 4-5 weeks, with a week between each visit to enable Peter to complete the work needed at each stage. If you have any of your own teeth remaining, we will need to have a referral from a dentist to confirm that you are dentally fit, before we can proceed to making a new denture for you. If you are happy to see your own dentist to have a check-up, we can write to the dentist to ask them to provide a referral letter – in this case, you can save time by printing a copy of our standard referral letter request, which you can take along with you and get the dentist to sign, then bring it in with you when you come in to see Peter. Alternatively, if you don’t have a dentist, we can refer you to a local dentist who will perform the check-up and provide the referral for a small fee. Once you decide to go ahead, primary impressions will need to be taken. These are taken using a medical-grade alginate, which is a very malleable compound, and a standard impression tray.
From this impression, Peter will cast a plaster working model of your mouth and teeth to start the process; and use the model to make a special tray Image which will be used to take a secondary impression. The special tray fits much more closely to your teeth and gums than the standard tray, giving a much better and clearer impression, which is used to make the bite block Image for the bite registration.
Bite Registration
Your bite is the relationship of your upper and lower teeth as they approach each other; in other words, how your teeth fit together. A bite registration is necessary to ensure that all the inner contours of your mouth are accurately mapped, so that Peter can fit all the teeth on to your new denture in the correct places. A bite block is made from wax, and you will be asked to bite down on this. The resulting bite registration can then be adjusted by adding or removing wax, to get the position of the teeth absolutely right. At this stage, you will discuss and agree the type of tooth, shade and size of tooth to be used.
Try/Retry
Once the teeth have been fitted to the wax model, you will need to come in to try it in. If the bite is not quite correct, adjustments can still easily be made and in this case you will need to come in to try it again. Hopefully, that will be enough to get it right, but Peter will not move on to the final stage – setting the teeth in the acrylic/flexi/chrome base – until you are both completely happy with the result.
Fit/Finish
At the final visit, Peter will check that the Fit of the denture is as perfect as possible. He will be able to make any final little tweaks if necessary, but many dentures do go in first time without any adjustments being needed.
Aftercare
When you collect your dentures at the final visit, Peter will go through getting used to wearing dentures, if you are new to dentures, and also how to care for them. We do have hand-outs with all this written down, so don’t worry that it is all too much to take in! Info/Downloads
You will need to wear the dentures for a few weeks to let them settle down and your mouth to get used to them, but if you still have problems after this, any eases and adjustments required are still part of the treatment and don’t incur any extra costs. Just give us a call and we will arrange for you to come in to have the problem looked at and sorted out.