Dentures

Keep Your Own Teeth If You Can:  Dentures should be fitted only when your old teeth are causing you health problems which cannot be remedied by dental specialists or doctors. It is far better to keep your own teeth for as long as possible, and here are the reasons why:

COSMETIC: The roots of your natural teeth are embedded well down into the gums of the jaw. When your teeth are removed, the natural shape of the mouth is undermined, as this causes the  gum line to become eroded;  imagine it being more or less mined, by the digging out of the natural teeth. The denture gives you teeth replacements, but it cannot possibly repair or fill out the damage done to the natural shape of the mouth and jaw once your teeth have been removed. Your appearance is changed forever once you have your teeth out; that is, unless you can afford expensive dental implants and jaw reconstruction. Even keeping old roots in the gums helps prevent your face changing shape and it developing that sunken look which is characteristic of one who has dentures.. Unless the roots of broken teeth are causing you health problems, then it is really better to leave them there.

CHEWING with your own teeth is far more effective than chewing with dentures – assuming you have enough of your own teeth left to do the job. Dentures, if they are made by an artful dental technician, can work surprisingly well, but never as well as your own teeth, because the bottom plate is not fixed to your jaw and does not have anything to hold it there.  Consequently, it can move around, even as you are eating, or worse, while you are simply talking to people, which proves to be very embarrassing. It is possible to get  tooth implants on either side of the lower jaw, for the purpose of holding down the plate. But if you think about it, instead of dental implants, then it might be best to keep a few of the original back teeth in the first place, so that these could be used for anchoring the plate. No one advised me about these things when I got my teeth removed. These notes are all from personal experience !!!

ALLERGY to modern denture-making materials is the worst aspect of having dentures in my experience.

DENTURES WITHHOLDING TOXINS is another issue.

These two things are inter-related: I find that the very best materials have a life of only about three years. After about three years of wearing a new plate I begin to notice that my memory has become very bad. It continues to worsen over the next year or so, but by then I am beginning to feel quite ill for a lot of the time. My immune function becomes weaker, I suffer candida throughout the whole digestive system beginning with the mouth, my eyesight becomes poor, my nervous system is shot, and my skin begins to suffer from eczema. I feel very depressed. Then I usually cotton on to the fact that it is the plastic in the denture which is breaking down and making me feel so bad, as I can taste the plastic, like apoxy resin, or formaldehyde, in my mouth all the time. Then I remember that this is EXACTLY what happened three or four years ago before I got the new dentures – and, YES -the time has passed very quickly, as I have had these teeth for all of three or four years, the same life which the previous teeth had.Then I do an experiment whereby I leave the teeth out for a few days. Like magic, my memory begins to perform quite a lot better, and I stop feeling sick. Putting the teeth back in brings back all the old symptoms, and by now it is quite obvious that the teeth are the cause of all the problems, as I have begun to feel normal,  both mentally and physically,  without the teeth. After doing without the teeth, I cannot stand their effect any longer, and I have to simply go without the teeth until the new ones are made up for me.

My wonderful dental technician is fairly sure that if I had the old teeth relined after two years or so, then this problem would not occur. He is convinced that the reason my health declines so badly is because of bacteria which get into the plastic once it begins to pit after a few years. However, knowing about my sensitivity to formaldehyde and plastics, etc, I am not convinced, and so I have gotten brand new teeth made each time, just to make sure.

I have found a new dental technician who has made just the greatest teeth for me using porcelain teeth to minimize the effect of having too much plastic in my mouth. But years before meeting my new dental technician, I went to a man who made up new teeth very cheaply: the plastic in these dentures caused panic attacks and all kinds of ill health immediately from the moment I began wearing them. The actual teeth of these dentures was plastic as well as the plate. They tasted of plastic all the time.  Now, after having experienced ill-health with several different dentures over a period of about twenty years, I know that the plastic in those dentures was the cause  of a sudden decline in health, especially mentally, which occurred once I began wearing that set of new dentures.

I think that the old kind of plastic which was used in denture making in war time was harder and more durable than modern denture-making materials.  My father still has the same set he was issued with in 1942.  He has a fantastic memory. This type of plastic doesn’t break down as quickly as what the softer modern materials used by dental technicians today do: they use these softer materials because they are easier to work with, and they probably get a better fit with the newer materials; but I think the bad effect of these plastics and acrylics on people’s health has yet to be determined. A condition similar to alzheimer’s affects me after several years of wearing a product made with these new plastics/acrylics. One plastic, as already mentioned, caused memory loss and anxiety right from the moment I began wearing it. I wonder how many people suffering alzheimer’s might have dentures made with modern plastics/acrylics?-  Of course, it won’t be the sole contributing factor in the occurrence of this disease , but I think that research in this area definitely needs to be done.

VITAMIN C has a damaging effect on dentures. Megadoses of Vitamin C, whilst being good for the purpose of detoxifying the body, actually cause the plastic of your denture to erode and break down more quickly than otherwise, and this will mean that you are unknowingly ingesting particles of plastic along with the Vitamin C.  If you need to take Vitamin C, then it is best to take it with the dentures removed, or to swallow a tablet quickly with a glass of water rather than let it sit in the mouth where it will interact with the plastic of your teeth. Many other strong vitamins, minerals and herbal products cause this effect to denture plastic; or they are retained in the denture plastic for a period after dosage.

DENTURE CLEANER is another thing which can cause health problems. Even after having brand new dentures fitted this time I began to feel dizzy and unwell after a few days: I had been recommended a denture cleaner, and thought that regular use of this product might keep the bacteria at bay and therefore give more life to the teeth. But, again, these modern plastics/acrylics have the ability to attract and hold poisons, including the chemicals in denture cleaner. Once I realized where the source of the problem lay, more or less after I recognized the taste of the cleaner remaining on the teeth even after using copious amounts of water to flush the teeth, I stopped using the product: but it took about a month before the dentures were clear of these chemicals.

I found that ordinary baking soda toothpaste made for people with their own teeth worked well: there is nothing harmful in the baking soda toothpaste, which I used, for the denture plastic to absorb. I decided, against professional advice and marketing ploys on telly, which tell you that this type of toothpaste scratches your dentures, making pits where germs can breed, that I would just have to risk using normal baking soda toothpaste and “the pits” rather than use a specific denture-cleaning product whose chemicals were obviously poisoning me.

The effects of CHEMICAL POISONING FROM EXTERNAL SOURCES is made worse, again, because modern, soft denture plastic/acrylic materials draw chemicals into their fabric, which intensifies the effect of the poison. Using any strong cleaning chemicals, or even walking near areas where herbicides have been sprayed on grass verges affects the person who is wearing modern dentures more so than someone who has their own teeth, because the poisons are absorbed very quickly into the fabric of the acrylic/plastic fiber. My experiment with the denture cleaner on brand new teeth has proved the point, at least to myself. However, this experiment confirms what I sensed to be true on another, earlier, occasion:

MAF, in Auckland, New Zealand, carried out a huge aerial spraying programme over Auckland city several years ago. This was, ostensibly, to get rid of the ‘apple moth’ which we were told, via  ads in our letter boxes and newspapers, was a risk to the  pine trees which are  grown here en mass by multi-million dollar overseas  companies. (and therein lies another story – much of the profit goes overseas, for a start, but growing pine trees en mass is bad for our precious soil: the practice causes mass erosion, and it affects the rainfall in an area, since pine trees repel water; so planting them in other countries and locations where they do not belong, where there is a rainfall considerably higher than where they come from thus has an effect on climate, generally) Just how MAF and our government expected to rid the place of a moth by spraying a whole city is beyond me – many of us feel that there was some ulterior motive behind this weird spraying programme.

Back to the story: every time the aerial spraying was done, many people reported detrimental effects to their health. These reports were generally referred back to the special MAF doctors and advisers, which was useless, as they had every-which-way reason to tell you that the spray wasn’t making you sick at all. You were ‘screened’ – had you ever had a problem with alcohol? – any mental illness in the family? – do you suffer from depression? -do you have allergies? – the implication was that these factors were the reason you were ill again, nothing to do with the apple moth aerial spraying. And it was no use writing letters to our one and only newspaper in Auckland: they were running the huge, expensive, full page ads for MAF which portrayed the spraying programme as being  helpful to us and the community at large: they refused point blank to publish anything which argued that the spray was detrimental to our health. A few weeks, earlier in the programme, the newspaper published a few letters, then suddenly said that the matter was ended and no more letters would be published. So it was difficult to prove publicly that the apple moth spraying programme was affecting our health, because we had no voice. In the end, the Victoria University of Wellington’s medical school proved conclusively that the spray was damaging the health of  people in Auckland, and it was stopped immediately at this point: But this was years after much spraying abuse had been suffered by many, many people. Thank God for the Victoria University of Wellington.

I began to suspect during this time that dentures retain toxins:   I could taste the spray chemicals in the teeth, and no amount of cleaning or soaking in any product would remove these poisons. I was being poisoned continually by the MAF spraying programme to eradicate the apple moth: not only were MAF helicopters and aeroplanes spraying us about every three weeks during parts of the year, but the toxins were being retained in the plastic fabric of the teeth after each spraying. I became VERY ill during this time, both physically and mentally. I was not treated for a mental disturbance, but my memory packed up, my eyesight became blurred, my nerves were extremely fragile and I became very neurotic. In the end, I had to do away with the teeth. As soon as I had done this, and left the city to avoid the spray completely, my health radically improved: I could remember again. I had new teeth made up for me.  Gradually, my health was restored to normal.

Best to keep your own teeth if you possibly can.