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Smiley Face

I never really visited the dentist for the last… Well… 20 years or so. Just recently, though, I’ve started getting wisdom teeth through which are pressing against my molars at the back making all my teeth feel crowded and uncomfortable. So, to a dentist I set sail!

My dentist, aside from advising me on proper dental care, told me about invisible braces from a company called Invisalign. As a part of my consultation we discussed what could and couldn’t be done for my under-bite and overcrowded teeth and his advice was that, yes, braces such as invisalign’s can straiten and re-arrange my teeth for me to improve my smile over all, however, he couldn’t guarantee that they could help any with my under-bite.

We talked about under-bite correction and he confirmed my fears; My under bite could be corrected with a surgical proceedure – one involving cutting out a length of my jaw bone and one tooth on either side of my face, which would then require me to have my jaw wired shut for some time to recover.

We agreed to take some preliminary photos of my teeth and send them off to Invisalign for their assessment and, at length, a reply came confirming again that, yes, Invisalign braces could indeed smarten up my smile, however, again, they weren’t willing to offer any kind of guarantee as to whether the under-bite could be corrected. Nontheless, I still wanted my teeth alignment and positioning improved at the very least, so we went ahead and took some moldings.

Taking dental moldings is a thoroughly unpleasant experience.
First off, your dentist packs something like a gum-shield with plasticine* and shoves it onto your upper teeth. It’s not too bad and, after a bit of a wiggle, off it comes – easy. Then he squirts loads of slimy goo like Polyfiller* into the plasticine and shoves it back into your mouth and, lying there in the dentists chair you can feel the goo dribbling out of the back of the mold and your dentist won’t let you take it out. You lie there for what feels like an eternity. Every so often he pokes at the mold, pressing it onto your teeth firmly. And you lie there, staring at the ceiling, concentrating on breathing through your nose and trying not to swallow the, now solidifying, dribble of goo at the back of your moth.

It lasts a lifetime (well, a couple of minutes, it seems) and then, finally, he pulls out the mold and it feels like it may take a few teeth with it – thankfully it is over… Until you do the lower teeth. Thankfully the lower mold is not nearly as bad as the upper set.

*Plasticine, Polyfiller and other descriptions are probably a misleading description of professional dental equipment that I don’t fully understand.

If anybody can invent some easy to use laser scanning equipment for use in scanning the position and condition of all the teeth in the mouth and make it cheap enough for all dentists to have one will win the appreciation of anybody who has ever had dental moldings taken. Please do it soon.

Anyway, after these traumatic few minutes, we had some moldings of my teeth, which were promptly sent out to invisalign for, I assume, laser scanning and computer modeling and, soon enough, a computer simulation of my gnashers came back and, under the instruction of my dentist, this simulated treatment was created: Teeth in motion…

Good eh? Reminds me of an animation by Terry Gilliam in one of the Monty Python movies – Conrad Poohs and his Exploding Teeth or something similar.

So that animation is actually two years of treatment going from crowded under-bite to tidy smirking smile. Did you notice? The under-bite fades through to a more socially acceptable over bite alignment — just. Unfortunately this does mean that, for a few months, I will have to be very careful when eating to avoid crunching and otherwise damaging my teeth as the upper and lower sets cross positions. Also, I will have to have ‘tooth coloured’ fixtures attached to four teeth on each side of my mouth for most of the treatment time.

How can you re-arrange an over-crowded smile without removing teeth?
Well, as I understand it, the typical British way of making space in the mouth for this kind of movement is to sacrifice one or more teeth and spread the remaining teeth out. However, the method proposed by Invisalign was to shave a little bit of material off most of the teeth creating enough space between each to move, rotate and rearrange them. I don’t know yet if this process of shaving material off teeth is painful at all. I will find out.

Did it work?
I haven’t started my treatment yet, my dentist suggested we get another simulation – this time doing things a little more traditionally and removing a couple of premolars in an attempt to reduce the over all treatment time. I’ll post again when this simulation arrives.

Disclaimer: I am not sponsored by Invisalign and, while they are welcome to give me free stuff, I did not get any free money or stuff from my dentist or Invisalign for posting this.

This blog post was a bit graphic and, due to the nature of its content, should not have been read by anyone.