THE PAINS OF BEING A TRUCKER
After a while in practice you begin to notice certain trends in how different patients will react to changes in their dentures. At times these trends are very predictable for example an elderly patient who has worn the same set of dentures for forty years finally comes in for new dentures, he/she will likely have more difficulty adapting to change than a younger patient who has been replacing dentures and going through the adaptation process every eight to ten years.
Sometimes however trends appear that are less easily explained. Over the past number of years we began to notice a disproportionate number of patients who drove trucks for a living were experiencing difficulties with sore or bruised tissues, particularly on their lower arch. When we went through our files of the last twelve years we regularly found higher incidences of sore mouths and longer than average adaptation periods. In light of this information we began an informal study questioning our trucking patients as to diet, oral hygiene and health patterns. In some of our long haul truckers it was revealed that nutrition on the road was not always stellar, but we had a hard time relating this to denture wearing problems.
These patients were then questioned as to what they felt were the reasons they suffered more discomfort than average with wearing dentures. Time and time again stress on the job was the common factor they related. It would seem operating vehicles with large loads on small roads and under varied driving conditions causes drivers to grind their teeth, or in this case, their dentures together. This in turn creates a constant pressure against sensitive oral tissues, and given the strength of some of these patients, hundreds of pounds per square inch. Obviously we do not want these patients to give up wearing dentures. Nor were the tensions created by their employment likely to change.
So we began a program of automatically constructing all new dentures with soft linings for those who are in the trucking profession. For most the results were very positive, with a layer of approximately two to three millimeters of soft silicone rubber inside the denture acting like a shock absorber, the discomfort of their jaw clenching habit was eased.
In light of these findings, here is a bit of wisdom for the rest of us out there sharing the road. The next time you whip in front of that big eighteen wheeler and slap on the breaks as the signal lights turn yellow, you are not only running the risk of a heavy duty rear ender, but also a confrontation with a fairly stressed out trucker with one darn sore mouth.