Home reliner ruins dentures and causes shrinkage

Abstract

A 35-year-old patient was a healthy, intelligent, handsome salesman. He had had immediate dentures made about six years previously. He remembers returning only once for a sore spot adjustment. When he called the dentist a second time about a sore spot, he was instructed to remove his dentures and suck on ice to cure the trouble. He said this treatment worked all right. When his dentures became loose several months later, he tried using denture powder to help retain them, but he soon found this to be messy and had to use more powder with each application to do the same job of keeping the teeth in place. When the powder material failed, he tried Poly Grip.? He said this was squeezed out of a tube and had a pasty composition, The Poly Grip had a noticeable taste and leaked from under the denture creating what he described as a “constant discomfort within the mouth.” This man then tried using Cushion Grip$ home reliner and thought that the pressures he felt constantly from this material inside his denture were good to stimulate his tissues and keep them healthy. The plastic was firm and, when trimmed, stayed where it had been placed. The newly applied plastic caused a burning sensation and anxiety to the patient. This burning sensation was so severe that it caused his eyes to water. To relieve this, he lay on his back with ice or ice water in his mouth. After the material had set and hardened, he said there were short periods of general nervousness and “hot spots.” At times, a genuine “toothache” was experienced. The patient said that once the burning sensation from a fresh application of Cushion Grip had subsided fairly well (after several hours), if he drank a cup of hot coffee the unpleasantness would begin all over again and last for several minutes. He noticed, after a few applications of the home reliner (each application lasting for from 6 to 10 weeks), that a greater thickness or quan-