What to Expect During Your Invisalign Treatment?

Hi, it’s Dr Michael Ghobrial here from Sure Dental. We have a lot of adult patients that come in and want to talk about straightening their teeth and whether they’ve had orthodontics as kids and their teeth have moved, or whether they’ve just never been happy with the position of teeth as they get older and things become more crowded. We have a lot of patients wanting to know about Invisalign. And one of the common questions is what do I expect during my Invisalign treatment? And as someone who had Invisalign as a patient myself, 10 years ago, I feel like I have somewhat of a unique insight into being able to tell what to expect. So the Invisalign process generally is quite a straightforward process. I tell our patients to expect that we take some thorough records. We take photos, radiographs, and a 3D scan. Once the plan has been finalised between us and Invisalign on their software and their team.

And we’ve got things right where we want them. I like to bring my patients in to show them what the plan is to show where we want to move the teeth too and what it’ll take to do that, and make sure patients are happy with the setup and the smile that I’ve designed for them. And we also go through where there’s going to be little attachments, little resin, tooth-coloured attachments placed on their teeth. I explain to them if we need any interproximal reduction where we’re going to do that little bit of shaving to make room for teeth. And so we go through that plan really thoroughly. So patients are aware of what’s coming at once. They’re happy we click. Okay. And we usually see each other a couple of weeks later to start the Invisalign process. Now the first appointment we place those attachments of resin. The appointment might take about half an hour and sometimes we’ll do a little bit of that.

Interproximal shaping of the teeth, generally speaking at the start of treatment. I like to see my patients every four weeks. So we give them four sets of aligners to wear, and they change that aligner every week. And we explain the need to wear it and all that sort of thing for 22 hours a day and how to keep your teeth really clean, which is really important. And we review our patients at that four-week mark. And then depending on how they’re tracking with things, what concerns they may have, then the interval might be a little bit longer between visits. And that’s quite a straightforward, simple thing in terms of wearing the Invisalign.

I remember finding when they first went on, obviously, it felt a little bit odd and a bit uncomfortable on my tongue. When I spoke for about a week, I could probably feel like my speech was a little bit affected for the first couple of days though. Others couldn’t hear that, but generally speaking, each time I would change the trays those first couple of days, there’d be a bit of pressure and maybe a little bit of tenderness of the teeth, not enough to stop me from eating anything I wanted to, but an awareness of the pressure and the movement of the teeth.

I used to actually get excited by that tenderness because I knew that it meant good things were happening in terms of straightening my teeth. It is generally quite a straightforward process. The Invisalign really relies on our patients wearing their trays and keeping their teeth nice and clean, but after a couple of weeks, once you’re used to them, you really hardly notice it just becomes a part of the new normal. 

So I hope that you’ve found this helpful in knowing what to expect when you go through Invisalign. If you have any inquiries or want to know more, you’re welcome to visit our website suredental.com.au. Send us a direct message on our socials or put an inquiry on our website or better yet. Give us a call on 07 3113 9698.