Dentures have been around for thousands of years. If your teeth have reached the point where you are considering dentures, we invite you to come in for a free consultation appointment. We will do an assesment of your condition and provide you with a list of options tailored to your individual situation. With the advances in dental implants and other techniques in the last twenty years, dentures are not as common as they once were. However, for many people they are still a very cost effective solution to the problem of aging teeth and gum disease.

Alan Anderson, Tillicum Dental Lab
We take a team approach to dentures, working in partnership with the Denturist, Alan Anderson. Alan owns Tillicum Dental Lab and is quite simply the best "Removable Prosthetic Lab" in this area, bar none. Alan and I see patients together here in the comfort of our office. He looks at them, I look at them, we get the impressions and measurements together. It helps him being able to put a face to the name and develop the case in a more custom fashion for each individual . Most labs don’t get the luxury of being able to see that kind of correlation between what’s coming in. All they see is the plaster model. Alan is a very talented Denturist with a great sence of humor, the patients love him. I've worked with Alan for 20 years now and it’s really nice having him here in the office and offering that service, knowing that we are serving our patients better than we ever did before.

There is a basic fee for dentures, and we can customize them in many different ways. For example there are different grades of teeth we can put in or sometimes people want gold in their dentures, we can have that put on the denture teeth at the lab. Some of our patients have had that in their mouth when they had real teeth, and they’ve kept that look in their dentures. People don’t know they have dentures. They smile, and you see a gold tooth on a back molar and you think that must be their own teeth, because nobody would have gold on their denture…We try and customize them so they look natural. And we always offer them implant options to help hold the denture in. Those have been just a godsend for people with dentures. The implants that are holding them in, and actually supporting the denture can give you a level of security in your denture that is unbelievable. The security you can get from these implants, and being able to chew things solidly is something you’ve never been able to do before with a denture.

What is an implant?

A dental implant is actually placed into the bone, much like when people get new hips or knees, where they use a titanium form that's placed actually into the bone, and the bone grows to it. That technique works very well in the mouth for replacing teeth. Research studies have shown that modern implants, when placed with the advanced technology and procedures available today can last many years, possibly even a lifetime. We do some mini-implants here in the office that are used as attachment points for dentures. For some of the larger ones, meant to replace a single tooth, I refer my patients to an oral surgeon. He places the implant in the bone, and once it heals I build the tooth and crown on top of the implant. It's a team approach, where he works under the gum and the bone, and I do everything above the gum and bone.

Who can have implants?

It depends on how much bone is left in the jaw and the shape and size of the ridge that is left. The oldest person we’ve done that to was 92. She wanted her denture to fit better and was fortunate to have a lower ridge that was flat as a dinner plate. The surgeon was able to get two implants in her lower jaw. We used attachments from the implants to her denture so it snapped on. It’s working well for her and she is very happy with the results. I believe that anyone who has dentures would benefit from the implants due to the increased security and retention. Just having the implants in there will help preserve the bone in the ridges underneath where the teeth are missing so it doesn’t melt away. It’s the old “if you don’t use it, you lose it“ idea. The stress of having the teeth in there, and the stresses that are translated to the teeth, to the attachment and to the bone helps keep that bone around.
    When people who have lost their teeth get traditional dentures, without implants, that bone has no reason or stress put on it other than pressure from the denture. The bone tends to resorb, or melt away. We see that especially with people missing their lower teeth. Without those teeth putting stress on the jawbone, over time it tends to melt away to the point where you can actually get somebody who can bite down on something and fracture their jaw. These days we are able to use some bone grafting techniques combined with the implants to hold things in and rebuild that. This is something we couldn’t do twenty years ago with any measurable success.

How do the dentures snap onto the implants?

Generally the snaps are like a little ball with an “0” ring snap that goes over it, kind of like a trailer hitch. The other way to do it is, instead of the ball like a trailer hitch, they may have a thin bar, say like a balance beam in gymnastics that connects to the different implants with clips in the denture that clip over the beam. The clips are built into the denture and the bar helps support and hold in the denture. Once a day they are snapped out and cleaned just as you would teeth. When they are removed, you also have to clean around the implants to keep the gum healthy around the implants. For an even higher level of security, if you get enough implants placed around, you can even get a denture or partial screwed onto the implants that you don’t take out. It stays in there permanently unless we take it out to clean it maybe once a year. This is getting close to what used to be called a bridge. We can actually make bridges on the implants if you are missing a lot of teeth.