Not actually braces

Not actually braces

28/09/2017

If you want straighter teeth, but aren’t all that struck on the idea of having to wear brackets and wires all over your teeth for a year or more, then at The Dental Surgery Burnham, we have a great alternative.

When you come to us for braces in Burnham, we can offer you a way of straightening teeth that uses what are known as aligners. These work in a very different way from braces. In Burnham, aligners are a true product of the digital age because they are created using CGI programming and 3D printing.

How do aligners from Invisalign work?

Firstly, you come to us for a consultation, and we use a digital scanner to measure the inside of your mouth with pin-point accuracy. Those measurements are fed into a computer-generated imaging programme to create an animation of your teeth moving from their current wonky placements into perfect alignment. It’s like your own movie.

If you decide to go for Invisalign braces in Burnham, we then send all this information off to the Invisalign factory in the USA, where, they 3D print a series of aligners. These are clear rigid plastic devices that snap on over your teeth rather like a bite guard. However, at 0.3 millimetres in thickness, once they are in place, no one can see them.

Each aligner nudges your teeth one step along the route they need to travel to reach alignment. They do this by being ever so slightly ill-fitting and the pressure from this pushes the teeth to move.

The aligners are removable, so you can continue to eat and drink whatever you want. However, you must wear them for at least 20 hours a day for your treatment to stay on schedule. Discipline is key to the success of this treatment. You may even lose some weight, as it’s much harder to fit in lots of snacks with this treatment as you have to clean your teeth thoroughly each time you eat.

You will receive somewhere between 12-48 aligners and will wear each one for about two weeks before moving onto the next in the series. The average treatment time is about a year.