Dental Braces Aren’t What They Used To Be

If you think dental braces means a mouthful of metal, please think again.

At Alexandra Dental Care, we like to offer our patients from Burton and Ashby the latest in dental advances wherever possible. Older patients especially will have seen ‘new’ procedures such as dental implants and teeth whitening come online during their lifetime and many have also benefitted from these.

Sometimes, it is not newer procedures but advances in long-standing dental procedures that bring about big changes to people’s smiles; none more so than in the field of orthodontics (teeth straightening).

No more metal braces

Older patient’s memories of dental braces are rarely pleasant ones. Having a mouthful of metal braces can be uncomfortable and also socially embarrassing. It is perhaps no great surprise that many patients in the past have preferred to have crooked teeth than wear them. Even modern dental braces that still use the wire and brackets system have undergone great improvements. Gone is the metal, and, instead, the wires and brackets are now made from fine teeth coloured materials. This helps to make them more discreet and also more comfortable for the patient.

One of the biggest advances though has been the introduction of the clear aligner. This method uses no wires or braces at all, but is a transparent medical grade plastic tray which sits directly over the patient’s teeth. The patient is provided with a series of these; each of which is designed to move the teeth a little towards their desired position and is then replaced with the next tray. This continues until the patient’s teeth are straightened.

At Alexandra Dental Care, we are pleased to be able to offer patients the most popular and well known brand of these clear teeth aligners known as Invisalign. These have been used for a number of years now and have successfully provided many patients with straight teeth to be proud of.

There are many benefits to using this method which include them being almost invisible. They are also designed to be removed when eating food and when cleaning your teeth. This means that there is a much reduced risk of gum disease or dental decay caused by food particles which are more easily snagged by traditional metal braces.

What improvement should I expect?

Naturally, patients undergoing this treatment, which can take between nine and fifteen months on average to complete, are keen to know what the end result will look like. Using a 3D treatment plan, we are able to give our Burton and Ashby patients a visualisation which shows how the orthodontics will work throughout the process and will finally reveal how they can expect their teeth to look at the end of it.

If you have crooked or uneven teeth and would like to find out more about Invisalign orthodontics, please call Alexandra Dental Care on 01283 216347 and we will be happy to arrange a consultation for you.

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