By Dr. Stephen W. Durham
Dentures are sometimes the solution for people who have lost the strength and structure of their own teeth. But today people who get dentures often find greater relief than they imagined.
Today’s dentures offer advances over what people might have grown to expect, and the improvement in appearance is often far greater than people imagine, for at least two reasons.
Not just good-as-new. Often better.
The true-to-life look available in today’s ceramic and composite materials is better than ever. And importantly, the fit of dentures today can be tailored with greater precision than what was available even just a few years ago.
Beyond comfort.
But more than just appearance, dentures today can be a solution for a disorder that is said to cause more than 92% of headaches. As many as three-fourths of all people may have some degree of bad alignment affecting their jaws and the muscles around them – the strongest muscles in the body.
The results of this misalignment – Temporomandibular Disorder or TMD – range from trouble sleeping, to ringing in the ears, pain behind the eyes, numbness in the shoulders and down the arms and yes, headaches, even migraines. So neuromuscular dentures often change people’s lives far beyond appearance and comfort.
Relaxing the jaw.
To find each patient’s unique, ideal alignment the patient’s jaws are fully relaxed – sometimes for the first time in the patient’s adult life. Today’s techniques make this possible within an hour in most cases.
Then the ideal, relaxed bite position is recorded in data from EMG and CMS images – a computerized bite analysis of your jaw’s most natural position.
The natural result of dentures.
Neuromuscular dentures designed from this analysis fit better of course, and they serve every day as a kind of orthotic, encouraging the jaws to align in the most natural position for each patient, and relaxing those powerful muscles.
The results can be more beautiful than the patient ever imagined.
