This case embodies everything I have learned by doing around a thousand 3D printed dentures. 2 visit removable denture fabrication is something that I have perfected over the years thanks to modern digital workflows. Many of you don’t know this, but I once had a philanthropic denture office for low income patients where I charged $199 for a completely digital denture. I was doing 250 dentures a month that was the break even cost, and after paying for uber rides for patients so they can come get their dentures we eventually ran out of funding. However, I learned a lot about efficient but quality dentures. Our low income edentulous patients really suffered with poor fitting, old dentures and honestly it has been the highlightof my career to help them. I learned how to do same day, and next day dentures by developing my own workflows that I now freely teach to other dentists.
This patient has been fully edentulous for 28 years. They have been semi-functional without a denture, chewing on the edentulous ridges and relying on a soft food diet. When they presented to me they had no idea how to close into a repeatable position. We used two essential MOD Institute innovations to be able to capture records in a single 1hour appointment. The MOD 3D printed VDO Guage, and the MOD Denture Record system. Both are freely available to download from our website. The extreme ridge atrophy of the mandible made for a difficult intraoral scan. I had to scan the mandible in two sections and align them later in exocad. You might ask why scan? Simply because scanning provides a true mucostatic impression and this gives me the very best fitting dentures. What about Border Molding? I was once a diehard advocate of border molding. However, when you take a full color scan you can literally see where the attached and unattached tissue start and stop and by gently retracting tissue while scanning borders are easy to find in design. Without physical impressions pushing tissue all around, I find it is simply a better denture. This patient came back for his second appointment for delivery, and we had absolutely zero adjustments. The power of 3D printing has cut even the most difficult cases down to just 2 appointments. For a free download and tutorial with CE credits go here: tinyurl.com/2p8awd4u