Surely the greatest satisfaction for a dentist is to restore the smile or the chewing ability to those who have lost these functions due to the loss of teeth. This result can be obtained with more or less sophisticated techniques designed to manufacture artefacts that are defined as prostheses.
The term prosthesis is not specific to dentistry, but is a term that generically refers to artefacts or elaborations that serve to replace parts or functions of the human body that have been lost for illness or traumatic events. In dentistry often the prostheses, when replacing or correcting particularly poor situations, can give the patient a remarkable improvements, with both functional and aesthetic advantages. The prosthetic solutions that give a more comfortable solution are fixed prostheses both on natural teeth and on implants: nowadays there are materials that allow particularly sophisticated results both functional and aesthetic. By the term “fixed prosthesis” are meant articles that are cemented or screwed (in this case some prosthesis on implants) in a provisional or definitive way but which cannot be removed from the patient either.
Removable prostheses, on the other hand, are articles that the patient can remove and which are usually attached to the residual tooth if it still exists (partial or skeletal prostheses) or stabilize by the suction effect created by the saliva between the prostheses surface and oral mucosa when the patient no longer has teeth (total dentures).
Obviously removable prostheses, which are much less sophisticated than fixed ones, are less expensive but also less effective in aesthetic and functional terms. They can be used as temporary prostheses during complex prosthetic programs or as transitional solutions for economic reasons (it is better to procrastinate buying a sophisticated and expensive fixed prosthesis using a removable prosthesis rather than opting for a low-priced, but low-quality, fixed prosthesis).
Recently, due to the use of new adhesion techniques, the new generation of prostheses allows a particularly brilliant aesthetic accompanied by a remarkable reduction in the dental tissue removal. These are the so-called adhesive dentures that include both outer coatings (facets) and metal-free crowns, which, for the particular aesthetic value, are mainly used in the most visible front sectors.
Prosthetic solutions from the simplest to the most complex are proposed and implemented in the Santoro dental practice by dentists with very high expertise and prepared by dental laboratories where perfection is the main objective and is achieved by using microscopes, avant-garde techniques and sophisticated materials.
