Welcome to the new "Ray's Denture Site"!
Update: 14 July 2011
Well, my apologies, I apparently had my wrong email address all throughout the website. I believe that I have corrected all of them now.
My email address changed, I am making the correction in all these pages, ray@rayhayden.us is correct, long story on why I let the vdo1.us site expire...
I still have to come in and tweak the pages of this site. Minor things will change, some will not be visible to you, they just make it easier for me to actually update the site as I need to. In an earlier update to the site, I noted that I was working on a Master's Degree. Well, I have completed the Master's Degree in Professional Development along with three Graduate Certifications in Change Management, Conflict Management and Resolution and Executive Leadership. I wrapped that up in February of 2011.
I began to study law and am also attempting to complete an MBA. I will complete a Bachelor of Science in Law in February of 2013, and if I pass what is known as the Baby Bar exam in 2012, I will continue my law studies through receiving my Juris Doctor Degree in 2015. The full reworking of this site will probably be one of the last things I work on, but maybe not.
For now, I want to touch on a few points:
Soft reline material: I use the new soft liner that is on the market. It is the orange plastic material in a tube. It is very thick, but very easy to use. It remains soft and I trim it for a few days, if not a week, after using it until it stops oozing over the edges. It is not difficult to use, especially if you use it more than a few times.
I have relined my dentures a few times with this material. It lasts for several weeks to a little more than a month before I need to redo it. I like the material, it is easy to use and fast to work with.
Think of it as a really thick adhesive. When you place the denture in your mouth, plan on sitting still for fifteen minutes or so while the stuff sets up. Trying to remove it too soon is a mess. I also tried rinsing my mouth with cold water before I try to remove them. I think this helps it set up too.
Cleaning the denture: Denture cups for soaking dentures suck. They are too small and confining for the denture. I use the clear plastic reusable food containers (the ones with the screw on top). I use the small one because it is bigger than the denture cup made for dentures, but not too big to have them sliding all over the place. I use some regular household bleach on them.
I use straight bleach in the cap of the jug it comes in and I brush my dentures with that. I let them sit for a little while while I brush my mouth out with toothpaste. I then re-brush my dentures with straight bleach and then anti bacterial hand soap or toothpaste twice and rinse very well with a lot of water to make sure all the bleach is gone before I put them back in my mouth... bleach is NOT good for your mouth. Even a little will "burn" the inside of your mouth and is not good. Be Careful!
Let me see if I have anything else I wanted to cover...
The whitest shade of white for dentures that I know of today is still mine - PW7 (or equivalent). The next whitest is PW4 and TruByte came out with a PW2, which is slightly less white than PW4, but much whiter than B1, which is whiter than A1. I recommend the whitest white because things get dirty. If you do not ever use bleach, and only use toothpaste or hand soap (or other cleaners), your dentures WILL get darker - it just happens. Bleach will bring them back to white, but you cannot make anything whiter than it originally was because that color is made through the whole tooth!
Dentures are smooth on the outside because they can be, and look most natural that way, if they are not smooth on the outside, your dental professional can polish them smooth for you. They are ROUGH on the inside to match your mouth. A soft reline will match your mouth better and can compensate for minor changes that the hard plastic will not be able to do. I would suppose that this could mean that the inside of a denture that will be using a soft inner liner could be smooth as well, because the soft reline will do the job. The inside can be rough for quite a few reasons that I won't rattle off, a rough interior of a denture helps hold them still.
I rarely use and adhesives because I do not need them, but if I wanted to, I would use the Fixodent Control for the lower and the Fixodent Extra Hold Powder for the upper. The powder does not do well on the lower, but the paste on the upper is hell, so you would need both. The extra hold power is applied by cleaning the denture, then leaving it a little wet, not too wet though or the powder will wash right out. SPRINKLE a light coat of the powder over the entire inside of the denture, then use a few drops of water over that. Then, just pop them in your mouth and bit lightly on them. You feel them firming into place, it is kind of neat really.
Experiment with the process and within a week, you will be an expert on how to use it best for you...
Immediate Dentures: Immediate dentures are the ones that you get when the final teeth are extracted and they slap in your new teeth. They will not fit perfectly - if they did, you got lucky! As your mouth heals and the swellings go down, you will need several adjustments and an eventual hard reline. The "immediate" denture, should be your first permanent denture. If it fits and works, why spend more money?!? Use it until it doesn't work for you.
IF ANY DENTURE DOES NOT FIT - GO GET IT FIXED - not doing so will cause you health problems later!
That said, I had all my upper teeth removed and the immediate denture matched the color of my lower teeth - ugh! When I had the lowers extracted, the upper was not going to match anything, so I had a complete new set made. I have had a new upper made since then, for that set, (I dropped, and broke the other one) and I have had a complete new set made as well since then - now I have two sets, but like the older set better... UPDATE, I now like the newer set better. I must have skilled myself with the soft reline so that it just fits better now with no discomfort. I would like to have this newest set remade from scratch - because I think the process failed, but these fit will, look great and get the job done for now.
You can soak any denture in just plain water... I would suggest filtered water if you have a filter thing on your sink. I have the commercial orange plastic soft reline that I do myself. In the USA, you can buy this at almost any drug store. It replaced the system that we used to use where we had to mix up our own material. That system worked great, but got pulled off the market a while back. The new orange stuff takes a little bit of getting used to, but once you are - it is great - better than the old system, nothing to mix up!
Oh, you can also re-apply on top of it. If you did not use enough, just wait until you can remove the denture - about twenty minutes or so... carefully dry the denture and orange stuff, then apply some more. The denture has to be dry, water under the orange stuff will lead to a failure of it to stick to the denture. I have not removed it yet, because I clean my denture with bleach. Bleach dries stuff out - meaning the orange stuff shrinks.
On that note, if my denture is nice and clean, I can re-apply some of the orange liner to it. If, on the other hand, I see a dot, or ANY discoloration in the orange material, I remove the soft lining, clean the denture completely and start over. The spot will normally look greenish or black. What that is, to the best of my knowledge, is either a food particle that got stuck in, or under the soft lining, or plaque - or some other nasty thing that would harm natural teeth.
I don't play around with potential "dirt" getting in my soft lining, If it is there, I remove the lining and re-apply it. I typically find a particle of food that might get under the lining is near the edge. If so, I can peel back the lining and brush that out - everything is fine. If it is not possible to brush the particle off, or it is way under the lining, I remove the lining and replace it. I have never had the feeling that I did not get a full use out of this type of soft lining, it has been great so far. That's about it for now...
4 April 2010
I decided to leave this older note as it has some good information in it
OK, I have got the new site all established using the php file coding. All of the pages are hand coded now and I am using php server side includes and cascading style sheets to manage (more efficiently) the website. All of my sites, I have four, will be updated using this much better technology.
I still have to come back over this denture site to update the content so that it is much easier to read. Less "sandpaper across the eyes" and more to the point. The problem is that I had sort of made the site (originally) as a diary for those also going through the process of obtaining dentures, then discussing the mini dental implants (I have six, not just four).
I see this site maturing into two types of information, the original purpose to enlighten those who want to know about the process, and additional information for once they have their dentures. I also see denture wearers looking for information relating to the continued care of their dentures.
All of the pictures that you see on this site show my original "immediate" denture followed by my original upper and lower set of dentures using the PW7 color (the whitest teeth they make). I no longer have that original denture. Somewhere along the way, I did indeed drop it and had a new upper made. The lowers I still have, the new upper matches those. I also broke a tooth on the new upper and thought that I'd have to have yet another new upper made, but they can order one tooth and fix it... so I did that and saved a bunch of cash.
I have also been back to have a complete new set of dentures made. This is important as we will all need to eventually replace our dentures. Of course, my new dentures are made with PW7 white teeth. They are also designed to show a little more of the teeth, as the healing process had my teeth kind of vanishing behind my lips a bit. The new teeth look fantastic! They do not fit perfectly though. In the process of being made, they got, what appears to be extra material "cooked" onto the gums of the denture. I cannot really explain this perfectly, but it requires a lot of trimming of the inside of the denture so that they fit well.
Due to some other situations in my life, the fitting process is going very slowly right now. I expect to ramp up the process over the next few weeks and have a great fitting set of new dentures working well by May of 2010.
On this site, I am going to add a page, kind of like a blog that does not update every day, but from time to time. The main portions of the site should "lock in" and become permanent, but I want to have one page where I can drop in and make updates. This home page will also update from time to time - you may have noticed that anyway.
Well, for now, stay tuned, share the site and make sure your links are updated. Come back often as I continue to update this site. Oh, the thumbnails with the blue border are clickable so that you can see the larger original picture. They load a little slower than the whole page because I am not using actual thumbnails, but forcing the pictures to only display at 75 pixels wide. It is worth the slight wait for the thumbnails to load. If you want to see the big picture, if it has a blue border - most do - then you will see the large original shot.
Come back often and visit, and remember that I answer all emails as fast as I can. Best wishes, always!
My email address changed, I am making the correction in all these pages, ray@rayhayden.us is correct, long story on why I let the vdo1.us site expire...
Ray Hayden