Scott Greenhalgh DDS - Cosmetic Dentistry

Monday, March 1, 2010

How to make your mom have dentures

Recently I was finishing up some crown work for my mom. She's a great patient; she worries about if she is sitting still enough, and making my work easy enough for me. She's happy that my dental office has a fish tank-somehow every dentist should. Last week, I finished a new crown for her. As I sat her up and we were chatting at the end of her appointment, it dawned on me...

A little background though. When I was in high school, I was decent at math. Somehow in the grand sorting out process, my mom was convinced that I should become an accountant. For years, she was convinced that this would be a good field for me (and I suppose, that I would be good at it). As the years go by, I do enjoy some good number crunching, and you can make some pretty cool things in Excel, but somehow I was never really drawn that direction. In fact, when I had the letter of acceptance from my dental school, even then, she still thought I should be an accountant. I think even at my graduation from dental school and actually becoming a dentist, she still thought that maybe this dental fad would pass, and that one day I would still be an accountant.

So, now we return to my dental office. As I sat her up finishing that crown appointment, I reviewed in my mind the dental work I had done for her over the years. She had told me that her mom had dentures from a fairly early age. She thought that she would probably have dentures one day, and that that would be no big deal. In fact every time I planned or brought her in for any sort of major dental work, she would say to me, "why don't we just pull them out and you can give me dentures?"

It dawned on me...If I had become an accountant my mom would have dentures!

We actually had a laugh about this. If I had gone down this different career path she would have had a different dentist, she would have been convinced that dentures would be OK, and then just have started losing teeth.

As I have practiced as a Denver dentist for almost 22 years now, I have seen that dentures are rarely the solution. Most people have no idea of how miserable a mouthful of plastic teeth can really be (that's part of why dental implants give amazing results for people). I'm really glad my mom still has all of her own teeth!

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