Dentures versus All-on-4 Dental Implants

Traditional dentures have been the status quo for centuries, but many patients struggle with day-to-day experience. The most common complaints that patients experience with dentures are:

• Pain or discomfort while wearing them.
• Difficulty when chewing
• Dislodging while eating or talking
• Food gets caught under denture while eating
• Speech and phonetic problems
• Inability to taste food
• Now, patients can invest in dental implants as an anchor to support more life-like teeth. This provides added stability, confidence, and a better quality of life.

1. More Potent Bite Force Means Fewer Food Limitations.

Humans naturally have powerful jaws and teeth because of their varied diets. Generally, your bite force with your natural teeth when at their healthiest is STRONG, falling between 200 and 250 pounds of force. The reality is that traditional dentures are not a viable option if you want to get anywhere near the same level of bite force. With conventional dentures, statistically, your bite force goes down to less than 50 pounds of force. Take your quality of life from a steak dinner to a bowl of soup. Traditional dentures cannot give you the strength you need for the life you want. Upgrading your dentures to an implant-supported prosthetic, such as an overdenture, increases your bite force by 167-235 pounds. Upgrading beyond the Over Denture to an All-on-Four hybrid complete bridge increases that bite force even further to nearly 250 pounds!

2. Less Maintenance Means More Money in Your Pocket.

The sad reality is that once a tooth is extracted, the bone starts to recede, and your gums start to recede and lay flatter and flatter. Dentures are made to fit your gums as they are the day they are made, and while they initially will fit okay, as time passes, traditional dentures will begin to progressively fit looser and less tight to your gums as your bone and gums recede and flatten out. This means endless adjustments and relines of your dentures, which generally cost a few hundred dollars every one to two years. Upgrading to an implant-supported prosthetic, which is fused to the bone and holds bone and gum levels from receding, eliminates the need for adjustments and relines to be done and minimizes the need for costly maintenance payments. Plus, think of all the money you’ll save not having to shell out money to buy messy denture adhesives and soaking solutions!

3. Better Design Means a Better Quality of Life.

Traditional dentures merely sit inside your mouth and are held in place by adhesive, suction, and the universe's will. Seriously. For them to work, the design had to be such that the upper pallet (roof of the mouth) has to be covered….the problem there? That’s where most of your taste buds are! With an implant-supported prosthetic device, you can have the bite force you need to enjoy the foods you love, and the open pallet you’ll have will allow you to taste the foods you eat! Implant-supported prosthetics allow you to also forgo that gaging reflex due to the open pallet design, will enable you to speak more clearly than with a traditional denture, reduce the instances of pain and mouth infections, and save you the embarrassment of having your teeth suddenly pop out on their own. Most traditional denture wearers are apprehensive about keeping their dentures in due to potential issues. They often stop smiling and laughing and do not feel as confident as possible. Implant-supported prosthetic devices allow patients to regain that confidence, functionality, and quality of life, and most think that this is the answer they’ve been looking for to get their lives back! To contact us to learn more about implant-supported options, feel free to use the contact form found here.