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Comment by knotty66 | Hacker News Reader

This is the principal behind 'all-on-4' dental implants. I've no idea how good they are though. I've seen a few YouTube videos but you never really know if they're paid shills nowadays.

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I effectively have an "all-on-4" situation but where the 4 are my natural teeth. I have a genetic condition which caused very few of my adult teeth to grow, so the ones that did grow in nice and solid have been capped with machined gold cylinders and used as the receivers for a full denture (google "telescopic copings"), which fits perfectly on them and also acts as a retainer for those teeth. It's actually quite nice and comfortable and my teeth went from being a painful horror show to functional and trouble-free in a relatively short timeframe.

Removable dentures?

Yes, but attached much more solidly than a traditional one. They slide onto the pegs and stay put perfectly without any sort of adhesive and are actually tricky to remove due to the precision with which they snap in.

If you already are losing all your teeth due to decay and can't afford full implants, then its a good option. Beside that, avoid it at all costs. You'll have massive bone loss where you dont have implants and eventually have issues (unless you're at end of life anyway and just want a good 10 years or whatever.)

If youre already losing teeth, the more implants the better, as your bone requires that object there to not recede - and bone grafting is very expensive and hit or miss.

Take good care of your teeth, theres nothing like the real ones. If I had not worked at a huge implant office, I wouldn't believe it.

Seems better than dentures, but not as good as teeth. You're putting all that stress onto 8 points in your jaws and probably losing jaw bone in between.

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