The clinician therefore needs to make every effort to reassure the patient and allay any feelings of anxiety. Many patients are apprehensive when they enter a dental surgery.This can be encouraged by paying particular attention to the following points: To reduce the chance of error and to coax the mandible into the rest position, the patient must be completely relaxed. Determining the rest vertical dimension is one of the more difficult tasks in dentistry, as indicated by the large number of denture problems that can be attributed to errors in this dimension. The rest vertical dimension is recorded to provide a point of reference from which the occlusal vertical dimension of the dentures can be calculated by subtracting the required freeway space (usually approximately 3 mm). Therefore we recommend that the reader also refer to Chapter 8 to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the clinical procedure. However, in Chapter 8 the point was made that most patients require replacement dentures, and that the existing ones provide a great deal of information which will be invaluable at this clinical stage. This chapter focuses primarily on recording the jaw relationship for patients without existing dentures. It is the process by which the information essential for the production of new dentures is transferred from the patient to the dental laboratory so that the dental technician is provided with what amounts to a blueprint for the prostheses. This clinical stage is, in fact, concerned with far more than establishing the relationship between maxilla and mandible. This chapter describes the basic technique for recording the jaw relationship. Recording Jaw Relations – Clinical Procedures

Bite block denture