Clear aligner therapy is much more common than it used to be, and I wish it was available when I was a kid. I had to go through braces three times and have jaw surgery, so I’m very keen with patients and diagnosing and helping them with clear aligners. In a nutshell, what they are is, think of it like a clear retainer that you wear for, you know, 22 hours a day.
And the reason I say 22 is you have to eat and brush your teeth, so we allow that in there. But it’s very sequential. We make different trays, we give you a handful at a time, and you switch them out every two weeks, and that’s what moves your teeth.
Clear aligner therapy is really popular, and I’ve done it myself, you know, the last couple years. In the old days, we had to do these gooey impressions and send it off to a lab, and you’d wait for a long time, and then they don’t fit just right because something went awry in the mix. We now scan with our technology.
We have scanners that actually scan you when you come in for your first visit. You come back, we show you your teeth before and after, before you even commit to anything, and then you can decide what you want to do with that. Clear aligners move your teeth without braces, without the discomfort of braces, and do it in a very programmed way to where you hardly even know that you’re moving your teeth, but at the end you’ll be surprised in how good they look.
Candidates for clear aligners can be anybody from six years old all the way up to 85 years old, basically anybody with a heartbeat. They work wonderful. It’s a great tool to help move teeth back into proper function and position for cosmetics.
I have a lot of folks that come in for clear aligner therapy that maybe they had relapsed, maybe they had braces and they didn’t wear the retainers, you know, that happens. Or we have people that just never got to, maybe they couldn’t afford it as a kid, now they’re an adult and can, but they don’t want to wear braces. Or maybe they have a tooth that’s moved and they don’t want to, you know, replace it that way.
A quick way is with clear aligners. Clear aligners can compare to traditional braces in a lot of ways. Basically we can achieve a lot of the same movements, but without the discomfort of abrasion of your cheeks and the brackets rubbing and brackets breaking and wires poking in the gums.
So clear aligners are a great alternative. Clear aligners can take anywhere from a few months to a couple years based on your treatment needs. If it’s a simple move of several teeth all the way up to a complete mouth.
Clear aligners, first, say you’re going for the first visit, you come in, we scan, we get them sent off, they get read and we get a diagnosis put together and trays made. Within two weeks you’ll have trays in your mouth and at that point you start wearing them and then go through the whole process of wearing them until the trays are complete. With clear aligners, people ask along the way, maybe they’re not happy with a movement or we’re not happy with the movement.
What’s great is with there’s a thing called revisions where we either rescan and resubmit that to the company and they make a new set of trays. It’s all rolled into the cost to where you don’t have any extra fees with that. So basically and even afterwards say you’re a year later you have you know something that has moved on you and you’re wearing your retainers nightly, a revision is included with that and you don’t and that’s what’s great about it versus traditional braces you have to put braces back on.
We just rescan and make some more trays to fix whatever a little gap that might develop. I find a lot of adults choose clear aligners over braces mainly because you could talk with them in very easily. They’re not self-conscious with them in.
They could take them out when they go out to maybe like a work lunch or a work dinner or to eat dinner to brush your teeth. They’re very comfortable to wear and the cool thing is that if you were to lose one we could reprint one very simply and replace it whereas if you’re out of town and a bracket breaks the wires poking in the cheek I can’t tell you how many times people have called said what do I do. So it’s a very simple process for adults.
