Full & Partial Dentures

Hello, hi! I’m Dr. Wayne Sutton. I’ve been practicing dentistry here in Rohnert Park, California—Northern California in our beautiful wine country—now for a little over 15 years. Dentures are an opportunity, in my mind, to do a full makeover for someone, and I’m not talking about just, you know, just to make a smile great, but actually rebuild the facial structure to re-support the lips and the cheeks and the vertical bite. The nose and chin sometimes look like they’re coming together, and that can age someone unbelievably—age them 10 to 15 years. By making a proper set of Fountain of Youth dentures, which is what we use, they’re essentially a facelift product. They’re not just a gorgeous denture. The teeth are beautiful, now and again, they’re set in such a way that they’re perfectly imperfect, right? We want these to be a little bit more on the natural side, but yeah, it’s hard to tell what’s a denture and what’s a veneer case in my office.

If you see the photographs, there are some dentures around on the website, not on the walls, that you would think are maybe porcelain teeth. So, when it comes time for a patient to address the fact that they need all of their teeth either removed or that they are an existing patient with dentures, most often I find patients with the lower full denture suffer the most. They have an issue with the denture staying put. It rubs around, it doesn’t stay in the mouth, affects speech and chewing—it’s really tough to live with. That’s one of the hardest things, I think, for patients to live with is a lower denture. And thank God we have implant dentistry because this is a solution for that. Whether it be choosing an option where we’re doing mini implants to stabilize the denture, or ultimately, the best option would be to do an implant placement such that we can actually permanently screw the teeth in so they don’t have to come out again.

Talk about life-changing! That’s life-changing. Patients that are dealing with a loose denture or problem dentures or sore spots—you can fix that with implants. It’s really exciting. So, we have a number of different ways we can go with denture patients and help them out. The first one, of course, would be to just make a properly made, properly fitting denture without any implants, and certainly, that’s a step up for a lot of folks that are dealing with the problem denture. The next best option after that would be to consider, at the very minimum, at least two implants in the bottom jaw. Then you’re snapping in like a snap-on tool. It clicks into the implants—still not as secure as more implants, but certainly much better.

We might go from 10 to 15 percent function—meaning chewing ability—and with just two implants, we can bring that up to 50 or 60 percent of normal, so that’s an excellent investment for patients to consider. If the budget’s there and they want to go all the way, man, it’s great to go more. If you can go five, we can screw in permanent teeth, and it’s unbelievable what we can do from there. It’s really indistinguishable from natural teeth at that point.

One of the exciting things with implant dentistry that we learned—and we started learning this probably 20 years ago, and now we know it’s a fact—is that bone will continue to deteriorate without any kind of stimulation in the bone itself. That happens if ever you’ve lost a tooth or anyone you know has lost a tooth. The jawbone gets skinnier because there’s no tooth there anymore. With implants, the exciting thing is when you put implants in the jawbone, it stimulates the bone around the implants, and the bone remains. So, you can save your jawbone with implants—that’s what I’m getting at.

It’s not only excellent for function, and you can screw down teeth and they hold, but now you’re saving jawbone because you put implants in. Vibrations down the implants transmit to the bone cells, and the bone cells say they can grow and grow stronger. One excellent point to bring up is that if nothing’s done—no implants or anything with the denture—the bone will continue to shrink away. And through the years, there are some nerves, some special nerves down here, called mental nerves, and as the bone shrinks, that nerve actually comes closer to the surface. So, if you’re wearing a denture on there, you can imagine the pressure on a nerve—it’s a problem! It can hurt.

By having implants and saving that bone, you can stop and actually reverse that process where the bone shrinks away. Loose dentures putting pressure on the bone causes the bone to go away much quicker. And if you have implants, you can save all that bone and prevent that from happening. If there’s a patient, for example, that has had dentures in for 10 to 15 or even 20 years or more, and they haven’t thought about what we can do nowadays with dentures, it’s a new world out there. We have teeth now that look like human teeth. They have three different layers inside of them. There’s translucent effects on the edges. The custom colorization that we can do with the pink color of the denture rivals nature. These are, again, the artists behind this kind of work, and I only work with the very finest denture technicians in the world on these cases.

And so you can see the difference. Just look at some of the cases that we have on the website, or you’ll see if you see people you know. When there’s an old denture, you can make these things so lifelike now. They fit better, they’re processed so that they actually fit tighter, they look better, and they look natural.