Complete Dentures: The Legacy Prosthetic System

A complete denture must restore not only the patient’s ability to masticate food, along with appropriate esthetics and phonetics, but also replace the hard and soft tissues lost due to atrophy. Unfortunately, the necessary knowledge and skills to manage these complex rehabilitations has increasingly been forgotten in the education of dentistry and dental technology. While the dental industry has introduced new manufacturing protocols and developed new materials to simplify the process of denture-making, this “progress” has done little to improve patient care. On the contrary, patients are more than ever supplied with insufficient prosthetics, often the result of cost pressure in the laboratory, lack of training opportunities, and economic considerations by the treating dentist. The one who suffers is of course the patient, as these individuals will often accept even the most suboptimal solutions as an inevitable result of their tooth loss. Steffen Rohrbach wants to change that, promoting the notion that functional full dentures must not be a privilege of prosperity but accessible to every patient who needs them. And that starts with educating and equipping dental professionals to treat these cases well. This book records the treatment concepts that have benefitted his patients over the years and is intended to be a work of reference for diligent clinicians and dental technicians who want to improve patient care and deliver exceptional dentures to every patient who comes seeking their help. Contents Chapter 01. The Primary (Anatomical) Impression Chapter 02. The Functional Impression Tray Chapter 03. The Myofunctional Impression Chapter 04. Registration Chapter 05. Model Assembly Chapter 06. The Model Analysis Chapter 07. Esthetics Chapter 08. Anterior Tooth Setup Chapter 09. Posterior Tooth Setup Chapter 10. Modeling of the Gingiva Chapter 11. The Try-in Appointment Chapter 12. Processing Chapter 13. Finishing Epilogue