Replacement complete dentures: no friends like old friends.

Provision of replacement complete dentures for an increasingly elderly population presents problems for the dentist. Reduced adaptability in the older person leads to difficulty in learning to use new appliances unless existing skills can be employed. It is therefore helpful to reproduce familiar features of a patient's old appliances, especially if these have been used for some years. This paper describes a method of treatment that provides both clinician and laboratory with the ability to achieve this objective, while retaining freedom to eliminate clinically-identified faults in the old appliances in the process of provision of the new. The technique depends on the substitution of conventional wax-rimmed record blocks with wax replicas of the old appliances. These replica record blocks lend themselves to any - major or minor - alteration during occlusion recording. They also incorporate a rigid baseplate and function as special trays.