Why Are My Dentures Painful & Uncomfortable? This is the most common complaint from patients who are new to dentures and the most common "treatment" or advice, is to get used to it. Indeed, a lot of pain from dentures is simply due to the wearer not being used to having a piece of plastic inside his mouth, resting on his jaws. Imagine wearing a new shoe. Now imagine a new shoe that only covers a part of your sole and every time you walk, the pressure goes to that part of your sole that is supporting your entire weight. Dentures, no matter how well-made, will be uncomfortable. Nevertheless, there is a certain threshold for tolerance. Nobody can get used to a dentures that causes ulcers on a daily basis. Such problems often lie with the design of the dentures. In these days when patients tell and insist on certain features, it is often difficult for the dentist to design a denture that will suit all the patient's needs. 1. Undercuts The proverbial hand in the cookie jar. Why can't you remove your hand when you've grasped a bunch of cookies? Because while you could easily slip an open palm into the opening of the jar, it may prove difficult to remove a fist full of cookies if the jar's opening is not big enough. The jaw bone is never perfectly smooth or even. A bony ridge in the jaw may have a bulge on top and a narrow base. Something that needs to go over the entire ridge must be wide enough to fit over the bulge. If the narrow base is not properly filled up before the denture is processed, the edges of the denture may end up too narrow to accommodate the bulge at the top. This may cause abrasion on the ridge or pressure on the teeth when the denture is inserted, removed or in function. However, undercuts are often useful in helping to retain a denture. The trouble is, the dentist or denture technician may see an undercut as favourable, but the patient may not be abkle to tolerate it. Anatomic issues can also pose undercut problems. When the bone is uneven, thick in certain areas and thin in other areas, bulging out in certain areas and sunken in certain areas, pressure from a denture plate may cause pain. Sometimes, these undercuts are due to recent extractions. Most people want their dentures fast. Sometimes, recent extraction spots can be painful and if the patient can't wait and dentures were constructed too soon, the denture may press on these sore spots and cause pain. 2. Uneven Bite This is another cause of pain. The dentist registers the bite of the patient and then transfers it to what is called an articulator. The articulator simulates the jaw relationship of the patient. Obviously, a device with metallic joints will not duplicate the exact function of the patient's mouth. Following clinical steps, laboratory procedures also introduce some inaccuracies to the denture. So it should not surprise anyone that the denture that finally reaches the patient's mouth will not be 100% accurate. Most sensitive to processing changes would be the biting surfaces of the teeth. A slight raise of the bite can result in a very significant change in jaw position. This results in discomfort and sometimes even pain. The usual solutions, suggested by the patients themselves, is to trim the surface of the denture in direct contact with their gums because their gums are feeling the pain. This is often incorrect. Pressure and pain on the gums is more often caused by uneven bite than by bumps on the tissue surface. 3. Inadequate support. The smaller, the thinner the better. There are few limitations to how comfortable you want to be with clothes, but with dentures, smaller coverage and thiiner material would mean less support and strength. Remember that a denture needs to function under tremendous biting forces. Thinner dentures are more likely to break. Dentures without adequate coverage will tend to move while in function and exert pressure on teeth as well as gums, causing pain. The fewer remaining teeth one has, the less support one is going to get from his dentures. There is one difficult situation called the free-end saddle. It means that a whole stretch of a quadrant of the patient's mouth is without teeth. With a tooth right at the end of a saddle area, there will be some resistance to downward and backward movement of the denture when the patient is biting. In the case of the free-end saddle above, there is no resistance to the backward movement and sinking of the denture at the end. This sort of dentures often gives the patient a lot of problems. The solution is pretty simple. Same set of dentures with some modification after the placement of supporting implants(s) at the end of the saddle. As the implants are not restored as crowns, the patient does not have to bear the full cost of restoring implants with porcelain fused to metal crowns. This is a simple, relatively economical way to solve the problem of the free-end saddle. Please call 62358316 for appointments or email us or Be Our Facebook Fan