Author : Michael MacEntee
Edition : 2nd Edition
Download PDF The Complete Denture A Clinical Pathway
I began the preface to the primary edition of this text by posing several questions: “Why write a book a few dying art, a few skill with little science, or a few service that’s not within the main purview of the dental profession? isn’t edentulism on the decline because the youth today will keep their teeth for life? haven’t oral implants transformed the edentulous mouth into a foundation for fixed prostheses?” I still hear these questions, even amid the ring of ageism: “Isn’t tooth loss an old person’s affliction?”
Everyone in dental academia knows that the curriculum has moved faraway from prosthodontics to embrace, it’s said, knowledge that’s far more relevant to the dentist within the new millennium.1 The seminal question remains on the agenda of most dental faculties: “Why bother with the entire denture?”
But, as I explained within the first edition, the art and science of complete dentures provides the inspiration for therefore much of a dental clinician’s day: taking note of patients; looking for diagnostic clues; distinguishing healthy from diseased tissues and functional from dysfunctional structures; assessing the arrangement of teeth for patients who are concerned about dentofacial disfigurements and for occlusal contacts that are physiologically unstable; making impressions; using dental articulators; manipulating an array of biomaterials; and communicating their observations and proposals to others.
