Complete Denture Case Report - First Patient - Prosthodontics

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The manner in which we were told to book our first patients hardly 3 weeks into the academic year left me in such apprehension that I needed some reassurance from some of the senior students that they were once where I was and had completed the ‘çhallenge’ successfully. My supervisor, as if sensing my fears explained to my patient that the treatment would take a considerable length of time as she was the first ever patient I would be attending to as a dental student. My patient’s main complaint was that the dentures that she had been wearing since 1994 were so ’blunt’ that she could hardly chew with them anymore, the teeth were indeed worn out occlusally and incisally. All she wanted from her new dentures was something to chew with and teeth of a lighter shade, which made my job less demanding. My patient, Ms Carew was a 72 year old pensioner who lived with her daughter. She took two buses to get to the dental hospital each morning. She had her teeth extracted when she was in her 20s and used to have a new set of dentures made every second year until 1994. She had been wearing her dentures at night for as long as she had had them and because she didn’t have denture stomatitis, it was a bit difficult for me to explain the importance of leaving out her dentures at night. On extra-oral examination (muscle symptoms and joint sounds), there were no abnormalities detected except for a slight asymmetry in the lip region. Intra-orally, the upper ridge was a class III (Cawood and Howell classification). The lower ridge ( class V) hap a poor prognosis with hardly any height and width and I was given the option to refer her to a fifth year student by my supervisor as it was a case that was regarded as rather difficult for my level of study but my fear of falling behind (and the possibility of someday bragging about my difficult first case) are amongst the reasons that led

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