Paul talks about Considering Dentures

What are the main reason someone may need to have teeth extracted?

There are various reasons, they may have their teeth extracted because of gum disease, they’ve had an accident or sometimes it’s a case of that they don’t like the look of their teeth.

How do you prepare patients for getting their teeth extracted?

The first preparation stage is to make some models of what their teeth look like prior to extraction, so the preparation is really reassuring them that they can either have their teeth improved or that we can make them a set of dentures identical to their natural teeth. We have a vast array of different shapes of teeth that you could choose from. These come in the actual moulds of the teeth, which is the actual shape of the tooth. We can show a patient, for example, a set of teeth before they’re actually placed onto a denture.

What options are available to patients?

Different options, for losing one tooth for example, a patient could have a bridge if their teeth are strong enough and healthy enough, and there are two types of bridges; a cemented bridge or they could have a Maryland bridge, which is cemented, but it doesn’t mean that you lose or have your other teeth prepared.

If you’re going to have multiple teeth extracted then implants are an ideal treatment, but unfortunately they don’t fall into everyone’s budget. And then we come on to replacing people’s teeth with removable dentures and they could be a partial denture or a full denture.