How to Fix Crooked Teeth

Hi! It’s Dr Michael Ghobrial here from Sure Dental. 

The other night, I was chatting to my wife about our eldest son who’s eight years old and has a fair bit of crowding developing in his teeth. And she asked me, “Well, what’s the best way to straighten his crooked teeth?” It’s a question a lot of parents ask, and it’s an even bigger question my adult patients ask when they want to straighten their crooked teeth. And so I thought I would record this video to help you understand what are some of the best options for straightening your crooked teeth.

Now, there are many options for aligning crooked teeth on the market. But probably the two best options that we find for our patients is one, we can use traditional braces. Traditional braces are tried and tested, they’ve been around for a long, long time, and they work well.

Traditional braces allow the brackets to be placed, the wires to be placed and it doesn’t rely on as much compliance, in terms of getting anything in their mouth or keeping something in your mouth. However, it always relies on compliance when it comes to cleaning around them. 

Traditional braces are great. They’re effective, they’re efficient, but you do have brackets attached. Things can be a bit uncomfortable and they are a little bit more conspicuous. However, nowadays, with ceramic braces on the upper teeth, that reduces that a little bit, but it definitely is a little bit more conspicuous.

The other way we tend to replace crooked teeth is using a clear aligner system. The clear aligner system that we choose to use here is Invisalign. Invisalign has been around for a long, long time. They were the first on the market with the aligner, and their technology is certainly the most advanced.

Their predictability of tooth movements has become really, really great. And so using a clear tray to put pressure on your teeth. It engages little attachments that we put tooth coloured filling attachments on teeth, and it helps us to turn or rotate or tilt intrude or extrude the teeth as we need to. And the beautiful thing about Invisalign is it’s quite inconspicuous. 

I remember when I had mine about seven or eight years ago, most of my patients didn’t even know I was going through it. It’s effective, it’s efficient. Often people ask, “Which one is faster, braces or Invisalign?” I say, ‘Listen, they’re much of a muchness. Oftentimes they’re just as effective as each other.”

Probably the benefit of Invisalign is you can take them out to eat and clean your teeth, which makes cleaning a little bit easy. But again, it relies on compliance, it relies on people wearing them for 22 hours a day, it relies on exceptional oral hygiene after you eat or drink and brushing and flossing regularly. 

So these are the two main ways that we fix crooked teeth. And if you’ve got teeth that are misaligned or you don’t like the position on them, and you want to have a chat about the different options, we would love to look after you. Why don’t you give us a call on 07 3113 9698, check our website suredental.com.au, or drop us a line on our social media, and our friendly team will help you organise your consultation. I hope you enjoyed this video and I’ll see you at the next one.