Introduction
Prosthetic dental medicine deals with lasting changes in the dental arches and the maxillofacial region that disturb chewing, speech or appearance. It studies these changes, works to prevent them and treats them with prostheses: artificial devices made individually for each patient.
What the subject treats
The changes are permanent, so they can't heal by themselves. Typical examples:
- Loss of hard tooth tissue from caries or a fracture
- Loss of one tooth, several teeth or all of them (complete edentulism)
- Congenital deformities of the jaws
- Acquired defects of the jaws and face, most often after tumour surgery
The masticatory system
Chewing is not the work of the teeth alone. The masticatory system is a set of separate organs and tissues of the maxillofacial region that work as one unit, and when it is fully formed it has five sections.
A prosthesis replaces part of the supporting section, but it has to fit the other four: the muscles that move it, the saliva that wets it, the nerves that sense it and the soft tissues that cover and border it.