Denture Wearers: Get Friendly with your New Teeth

Dentures are still mainly associated with tooth loss due to poor dental care by the majority of people in South Carolina and the American public. But more often than not dentures are used to replace a person’s natural teeth due to injury, accidents or tooth developmental defects. However, South Carolina dentists have seen dental technology in the 21st Century creating dentures that are so much like the real thing as to be practically invisible to the untrained eye.

Dentures are simply prosthetic teeth constructed to replace missing natural teeth. These replacement teeth can be conventional dentures, either complete or partials, that are designed to be removed. There are also many other different denture designs that rely on bonding or clipping onto existing teeth. Another variety of dentures—dental implants—is a dental prosthetic tooth or teeth actually grafted onto the bone supporting the base of the teeth in the mouth.

There are two main categories of dentures, depending on whether they are used to replace missing teeth on the mandibular arch (lower jaw) or the maxillary arch (upper jaw). Dentures are more aesthetically pleasing to others. This gives confidence to the wearer. Dentures also provide better chewing ability, the correction of the sunken appearance between the nose and chin plus provide structural support for the lips and cheeks.

The first sets of dentures in Europe, constructed of bone or ivory or made from the teeth of corpses, were found in the 15th century although most scholars agree they probably existed to some extent before then. The same practices were generally still in place, with a few minor changes, in colonial South Carolina and the rest of the American colonies. As no dental profession per se existed in Europe until late in the 18th Century, those that fashioned dentures were usually goldsmiths, barbers (an early name for a surgeon) and ivory turners. Later dentures were made of porcelain in the 1770s, to be followed by plastics in the 20th Century.

In South Carolina and the rest of the United States, dentures are usually prepared by denture technicians for whom few states have set procedures to train. The completion of a college program in denture or dental technology or four or more years of on-the-job training under the supervision of a denture technician is required in most states like South Carolina. A denture technician student must then successfully complete a two-year minimum internship in a dental laboratory prior to taking the South Carolina exam for licensure and registration.

Denture technicians can not actually work with patients unless they are qualified as both denturists and technicians. A denturist orders the specific appliance from a technician, who then creates the proper dentures following the denturist’s prescription and usually a mold of a patient's mouth or teeth. The model serves as the basis of the new prosthetic device. Denture technicians will build a wax model of the dentures based on the teeth mold. Finally, a cast used to form the metal devices is set in place and the material used to make the precise shape is cast. The color of the teeth is also carefully matched.