The Reality of Living Without Teeth or Dentures

Even if you believe you could learn to live without teeth or dentures, living without teeth or dentures affects your overall quality of life. Missing teeth have a significant impact on both your health and overall appearance. Before you decide not to replace your missing teeth, consider the implications and the potential challenges that you may face.

The Effects of Living without Teeth or Dentures

While it may be tempting to speak, smile, eat, and chew without teeth, having missing teeth causes a number of adverse health effects and functional challenges. Let’s mention a few that you may not have considered:

Difficulty Eating

Without teeth, it is difficult to eat a wide variety of nutritious foods that provide the vitamins and nutrients necessary to maintain good health and proper immune function, making you vulnerable to both oral and physical issues associated with poor nutrition. These include, among others, tooth decay, obesity, diabetes, and depression.

The act of chewing stimulates the salivary glands to produce saliva. Not chewing your food leads to a decrease in saliva flow which makes it more difficult to properly process food and pass through the digestive tract. Although you can eat soft foods by mashing or blending them, foods that are not adequately broken down can cause issues with the digestive process, resulting in chronic problems with upset stomach, reflux, and excess gas production.

Gum and Jaw Damage

When you eat without natural teeth or dental implants, your gum tissue and jaw must work harder to compensate for your missing teeth. Over time, this can make your gums and jaw become sore and irritated. As a result, even softer foods that don’t require much chewing become even harder to eat. When you rely on your gums to do all of the chewing process, your jaw joints must close beyond their normal limits. This can lead to gum and jaw problems, including muscle pain, TMJ, and infected gums. 

Communication Difficulties

Your lips, teeth, and tongue must effectively work together to help you to speak clearly. Without teeth, it can be difficult to pronounce some words that require touching your tongue to the back or the edge of your front teeth; try saying words like “fifty”, “sew”, “third”, and “that.” Notice how your tongue is used to form the correct sound. If you have no front teeth, pronunciation will be awkward, affecting your social and work life, where communication is paramount.

Risk of Losing Remaining Teeth

If you have lost one or more teeth to tooth decay or gum disease, you are at a higher risk for losing additional teeth unless the disease is controlled with proper brushing, flossing, and regular dental check-ups. Missing teeth also create space for any remaining natural teeth to shift over time, causing your teeth to become loose or crooked and no longer mesh correctly when chewing. 

The Effects of Having Improperly Fitting Dentures

Wearing ill-fitting dentures can cause a variety of issues with your dental health and overall well-being. These problems include:

Gum Issues

Dentures that do not properly fit don’t stay in place. They often rub against gum tissue, causing irritation, blisters, bleeding, or inflammation. Persistent inflammation in the mouth can increase your risk for oral cancer. Blisters that form on the gums and other tissues inside the mouth often cause pain.

Chewing Difficulty

If your dentures are loose or don’t mesh correctly, you cannot chew the food that you consume properly. The most nutritious foods are usually the most difficult to chew – fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, and meats. When you can’t eat, you give up nutrition because you must avoid the foods that require the most chewing.

Biting Issues

It is nearly impossible to bite with dentures that slide or are unstable. Improperly-fitting dentures can also cause you to use excessive bite force on the tissue inside of your cheeks, leading to a chronically sore mouth. 

Headache and Earache

Pain or discomfort from ill-fitting dentures can radiate in ways you never thought possible. Often health risks like earaches or headaches that have no other explanation are related to undiagnosed jaw pain or ill-fitting dentures.

Professional Dentures Are the Solution

Good-fitting dentures made by a competent dental professional can make all of the difference in your ability to chew and your quality of life. If you’ve been struggling to wear problematic dentures, it’s time for an evaluation to determine the best course of action to improve your situation. There’s no reason to suffer; there are solutions.

Dental Excellence

Professional dentures are customized especially for you and made by a licensed denturist. Before discussing your teeth replacement options, the denturist will thoroughly examine your existing teeth, gum tissue, and bone structure. Based upon their assessment, they will recommend the type of denture that best suits your unique needs and lasts for years.

Manage Discomfort

Besides making customized dentures and fitting them properly for your mouth, a denturist can help manage any pain or discomfort that you may be experiencing. New dentures often feel slightly uncomfortable until you become accustomed to wearing them. Your denturist will provide some tips and advice to help streamline the process of getting used to your dentures.

Professionally-made dentures not only improve your appearance, but they also make you feel more confident in social situations, help to restore function, and allow you to speak and eat more comfortably.

Flexible Options

If you have decided to proceed with dentures, you have several options to choose from based on your specific needs and dental concerns. Whether you need to replace all of your missing teeth or only one or two missing teeth in the lower or upper jaw, multiple denture solutions are available to address your specific situation. These include:

• Full Dentures
• Partial Dentures
• Denture Implants
• Immediate Dentures

The Top Dentures at The European Denture Center

European Denture Center delivers the most comfortable dentures and utilizes cutting-edge technology and biocompatible dental materials to design and fabricate your advanced comfort dentures. In addition, we offer:

• Affordable dentures and denture implant solutions
• We partner with Idaho’s most technologically-advanced dental laboratory to bring you long-lasting, durable appliances 
• We offer video consultation services to our patients to facilitate initiating treatment sooner rather than later

European Denture Center designs and creates the best-in-class professional dentures with superior fit and comfort. To help you achieve optimal oral health with a beautiful smile, we offer a wide range of durable and affordable dentures to address every need and every budget. Contact us today to get started on the award-winning smile that you deserve!