Pitfalls of At Home Teeth Aligners

Some of the malocclusions- that really means bad bite, but some of the conditions that patients have are not really ideally conducive to home types of treatment such as at-home aligners. Even though there are some categories that I think may work well for that, there are ancillary services that dentists provide; treatments during the aligners that allow the dentist to get a better result. 

Some of them are called IPR: interproximal reduction. In other situations, the type of tooth movement, say root torquing, for example, a more difficult movement that aligners aren’t really amazing at without an additional button- or an attachment that we can place on the aligner on the teeth and help to encourage that movement. Ultimately, what an ends up is a partly finished treatment. 

So, the final results are going to be compromised. Certainly, there are some general risks with developing problems with your bite after if the teeth are moved and they don’t really track or follow these aligners. Sometimes you can end up with a bite that is only hitting on one tooth that can be dangerous or opening up the bite. Sometimes we see some bumping into of teeth at the end, just by the nature of the way the teeth actually move and their ability to move. 

When you go to a dentist for this, they’re tracking these things. They’re making sure that something bad is not developing so that you end up with a problem down the road. The good news is that if you have questions, if you’ve started this process, this at home, a consumer process of moving your teeth and you’re not sure if it’s going in the right direction, you can always stop and have a professional kind of get involved. 

I’ve seen some patients like that where they had some concerns, or they weren’t fully satisfied with the final results, and they wanted to tweak things a little bit and were able to do that as well.