Whether you’ve worn dentures for a few months or for a few decades, it can sometimes be challenging to figure out if you actually need a denture adjustment. In order to help you or your loved ones to determine if a denture needs to be adjusted, you can look for these three common signs.
Three Indications that Your Denture needs to Be Adjusted
- Your denture hurts when you are watching TV or reading the newspaper. Think of your denture as if it were a shoe. When you go to the shoe store and sit down on the bench to try on a new shoe, you aren’t going to get up to try to walk around in it if the shoe already hurts. The same idea applies to dentures; if your denture hurts when you are playing cards or doing an activity other than eating, it’s likely that you need a denture adjustment. The conceptis that if you are uncomfortable with the teeth when you aren’t using them to chew, then you will almost certainly be uncomfortable with them when you try to eat and chew with them in place.
Fortunately most dentures can be adjusted relatively easily and at Dental Home Services, one of our traveling dentists can come to your home or assisted living facility and adjust your denture for you. Sometimes the denture needs to be adjusted because a sore spot has developed, and other times the bite on the denture needs to be tweaked as everyone’s mouth does change slightly over time. - Your denture moves when you smile, or slides around when you try to eat. Even if your denture doesn’t hurt when you have it in, your dentures should stay in place when you are smiling, eating and otherwise making facial expressions. And while adding Fixodent or Poligrip can help with loose dentures, these materials should be used only if the denture cannot be adjusted to work well without these adhesives. As we said earlier, as your body changes, your mouth also changes, and these changes can affect how your denture fits. The dentists at Dental Home Services have worked with thousands of patients and their dentures, and have the experience to know when a denture needs to be adjusted, and what adjustment needs to be made in order to solve their patient’s problem. For example, if a denture falls out when a patient smiles but otherwise feels tight, it’s likely that the denture is too long, and adjusting the length can solve the problem. Similarly, if a denture slides around while someone is eating, it’s possible that the patient’s bite has shifted slightly. This bite shift can cause some teeth to touch before other teeth touch, which results in the denture moving around while the patient is trying to chew.
- You are lisping or hearing a whistle-like noise when you are speaking. Dentures are complex prostheses that have to be esthetic and functional, meaning that they need to look realistic when you smile, and stay in your mouth when you eat and speak with your friends. People often forget that the position of your tongue and of your teeth in your mouth help determine what your speech sounds like. If the teeth are in the wrong position, or if the bite on a denture is too high or too low, a patient’s speech may be affected. Some patients will say that they feel like they “can’t close their mouth” whereas other patients complain that they feel as though they “can’t open wide enough to chew or speak”. Both of these conditions have to do with the bite on the denture, and need to be evaluated by a dentist with experience with dentures in order to determine if the problem can be solved by adjusting the teeth, or if more significant repairs would be needed.
Get in touch
If you or a loved-one are in an assisted living facility or homebound, and need a dentist to help with denture problems, please give us a call. The team at Dental Home Services has visited thousands of people over the decades at their residences and across New Jersey and Staten Island, helping them to eat, chew and smile with their dentures.