Dentures – Framingham, MA
Restore Your Smile to Working Order
When you lose permanent teeth, feeling down in the dumps is easy. The resulting changes in your smile hurt your looks and diminish your oral health. However, you don’t have to live with unseemly gaps in your grin. You can always restore your smile by getting dentures in Framingham! By wearing these prosthetics, you’ll see major improvements to your mouth. To learn more about them, just keep reading or visit our office for a consultation.
Who’s a Good Candidate for Dentures?
Whether you’re missing multiple or have no remaining natural teeth, there is a possibility that you can live life with greater confidence and health thanks to dentures. With three different options available to patients – partial, full, or implant dentures – our team can build a prosthetic that will change your daily life, allowing you to eat, speak, and smile like never before. To learn more about what your dentist will consider when examining you for dentures, keep reading.
Effects of Missing Teeth
If trying to eat or speak without teeth feels like a hopeless cause, it’s because they play a pivotal role in how your mouth works. Chewing food and speaking clearly can become almost impossible if you lack a complete set of teeth. As a result, you may find that you lack the necessary nutrients to fuel your body and promote optimal overall health. You might also miss out on opportunities to advance at work or meet someone new.
Missing teeth can take a toll on your physical, mental, and emotional health if left untreated, which is why it’s essential that you seek professional help to improve the state of your smile.
What Qualifies You for Dentures?
As you’d expect, the best denture candidates face the effects of missing teeth. They lack pearly whites and thus struggle to eat, speak, or even smile. Of course, you’ll need to consult our dentists to confirm your candidacy. They’ll perform an oral exam to see if dentures suit you. Based on its results, they and their team will draft a treatment plan just for you. Alternatively, not everyone with tooth loss qualifies for dentures. Some who still have teeth along an arch might benefit from different restorations. Furthermore, a patient needs sufficiently healthy gums to support dentures.
Alternative Tooth-Replacement Options
When considering dentures to replace your missing teeth, your dentist might find that an alternative solution better fits your needs. These can include:
- Dental Bridges – If you’re only missing between one and four consecutive teeth in a row, it may be best to have a dental bridge created. This unique restoration fills in the gap that was once occupied by natural teeth. Now, these artificial teeth use healthy ones as anchors to remain firmly in place, effectively blending in to create a beautiful appearance.
- Dental Implants – Permanent tooth replacement can also be another option, especially if you prefer to avoid frequent replacements and denture adhesives. With dental implants, we can position them within the jawbone to help provide continuous stimulation while also supporting a custom-made denture that rests on top of the implants and can last for 30 years or more with optimal care.
Types of Dentures
As part of the consultation, our dentists will decide which kind of denture you need. There are different types, you see, with each having distinct features. Depending on your needs, one might work better for you than another. Given that fact, you can expect our office to suggest one of three possible dentures:
Partial Dentures
As you might expect, partial dentures replace only a few teeth. Therefore, they clasp onto the surrounding pearly whites to stay secure. They’d slip and fall from your mouth otherwise.
In terms of composition, partial dentures consist of artificial teeth attached to a gum-colored base. By filling in smile gaps, they keep your other teeth from tilting.
Full Dentures
In contrast to partial models, full dentures replace all the teeth along an arch. Given this fact, they use natural suction instead of clasps to stay in place.
In terms of the base, a full denture doesn’t differ much from the partial kind. The former relies on acrylic, gum-colored resin just as the latter does. That said, a full denture does have the perk of sitting snugly on the gums.
If you seek a more permanent and unwavering option, you should try implant dentures. These kinds make for a great alternative to traditional models.
To be clear, implant dentures rely on dental implants — prosthetic teeth surgically placed into the jawbone. These restorations gradually fuse with your jaw, ensuring the latter doesn’t erode or deteriorate. The fusion also keeps the denture secure enough not to slip or fall.
The Benefits of Dentures
Overall, tooth loss can have greatly adverse effects. It often makes daily tasks – speaking, eating, and even smiling – challenging. However, the condition is easily remedied with well-crafted dentures. These restorations help your situation with many worthwhile perks! As for what the benefits of dentures are, we at Framingham Dental Group will happily explain. Simply keep reading to learn more, or call our office for additional details.
Psychological Benefits
Going without teeth is hard to accept emotionally. It’s an unnerving situation, especially when you first lose a pearly white. As such, tooth loss can quickly lower your self-esteem and body image. You’d then feel anxious, awkward, or sullen in social settings. From there, you might develop profound sadness or depression.
Fortunately, dentures would get your emotions back on track. After all, they’d restore your whole smile, inspiring self-confidence and a lighter mood. The result would be less anxiety and greater ease around friends and family, as you’d feel calm about your looks, speech, eating ability, and more.
Clearer Enunciation
Speaking is quite a challenge when you lack teeth. That’s only natural – each tooth in your mouth positions your lips and tongue for it. Consequently, even missing a few will make words hard to pronounce. You could also develop a noticeable speech impediment.
Still, you can rely on dentures as substitute teeth. They’re just as able to support your tongue and lips for speech. However, you’ll need to adjust to them first. Practice is crucial to speaking with dentures naturally.
Improves Nutrition
Being without teeth also makes eating meals harder. You see, a full set of pearly whites lets you chew even the toughest products. That means missing any will lead to dietary restrictions. More specifically, you may be tempted to exclude foods with tough textures. In that case, you’ll likely suffer malnutrition or indigestion.
Luckily enough, dentures can fix meal problems caused by tooth loss. The restorations’ artificial teeth chew food as well as natural ones. Therefore, the prosthetics widen dietary choices and thus ensure nutritional health.
Preserves Oral Health
In addition to your looks, tooth loss also harms oral health. The smile gaps it causes allow harmful bacteria to breed. Worse yet, those same spaces make surrounding teeth tilt and fall. Such things will ruin your smile if you aren’t careful.
All the same, one crucial way that dentures protect oral health is by “filling” said gaps. This action keeps nasty germs from growing freely. Simultaneously, this gap closure stops teeth from tilting.
Expands Opportunities
A pretty smile is crucial to a good first impression. People notice your grin before other features, so your teeth play a big role in how others view you. Gleaming teeth, then, strengthen your bonds and opportunities with friends, family, and acquaintances.
Given these facts, a gorgeous grin from dentures could easily sway your peers. The prosthetics’ acrylic teeth are highly lifelike and blend seamlessly. That being the case, they’ll expand your opportunities with friends, family, co-workers, and more. They might even land you a promotion at work!
