Putting Braces on

Hello, I'm Dr. Gottman, one of the things I get asked most in the exams I do is what it's like to have

braces

, does it hurt, how long does it take, and what will that experience be like, so I thought I'd be nice. It's great to show a little video of us

putting

braces

on one of our patients and that's what we're going to do right now, it's step by step what we do or there's no magic to it so I wanted to show it to you. the video so that you feel comfortable seeing what awaits you and what that entire experience will be like.

Okay, we'll walk you through getting braces and I'll use this patient we'll call. Sarah, we're going to put Sarah's braces on right now and we're going to start by basically

putting

on a little cheek retractor and this cheek retractor keeps her lips and her cheeks away from her teeth, which you'll see later, we also use a little device that holds her tongue. away from the teeth now the reason we want these guys there is we want to keep the teeth as dry as possible once we start preparing them and working on them we don't want lips, saliva or tongue interfering with what what we're doing and here you see we're painting each tooth individually with a small cotton applicator and we're basically sterilizing the surface of the tooth and preparing it for the glue.

This glue is a special type of glue that adheres to the tooth. surfaces only after they have been prepared with this special material once we put the sterilizing agent we rinse it and then we dry it we want the teeth to be as dry as possible and then here you will see me come in and put on each of the braces one At the same time, now the braces are the braces, we call them brackets, each one has a little glue and we place them on the tooth as if you were putting a sticker on something, so you put them on like a sticker, but the glue is not there yet set nor dry, so it allows us to work with the braces, so at this point we already have all the braces on the teeth, one of the things that you can also notice at this stage. is that each of the teeth has a very specific bracket and in fact we use six different types of brackets on the upper arch and five different types of brackets on the lower arch and they are a little different in the shape and dimensions of some of them They have hooks for them to wear rubber bands and you can see those hooks on the brackets themselves, so they're all very specific to the individual tooth that they're moving here, you can see that we.

We're actually trying to get the angles of the brackets right, so we set them up with what we call a scaler and now we go in and we're actually measuring the height of each bracket, now each bracket along with each mm. a specific bracket every mm for ideal bracket placement, that's why I'm using this measuring device and holding it at different angles to get the brackets with the correct measurements on each specific tooth. A couple of things I want to talk about with specific brackets is that within those brackets they actually have what we call a built-in prescription;

That prescription, once we place a wire on that prescription, dictates the angulation and the torque or inclination of each individual tooth, as well as the height of each individual tooth within the mouth. So one of the things that is important to me is that when I go in and start putting on the braces, I can already visualize the teeth and their final position, so I start with the end in mind. I can now see the final results. The final smile, even before I put on my braces, now here you see the special light, it's basically visible within the visible spectrum, so it's not a laser or anything like that, there's no heat generated, it's just a very intense light that acts . as a catalyst to make the glue harden and each bracket needs to cure about 1015 seconds and we move forward one bracket at a time and you can see when we finish moving the light through the glue, that bracket then sets and becomes permanent. permanent attachment on the teeth until we decide to take the bracket off and see that at this point there really isn't any pain when putting the braces on like I said, it's like putting stickers on your teeth doesn't really feel normal at first. you are having a hard time getting your lips over your teeth over the braces everything feels very bulky and thick now once we have all the braces on we move on to the next step which is putting the wires on the braces is that okay at this point ?

Sarah has all of her braces on, we've used the light to harden the glue and now she's ready for the next step, which is putting her wires on. Now these cables are made, well, we call them night-binding copper cables. Basically, this material was developed by NASA quite a while ago and is a temperature sensitive cable that is also a shape memory cable. Now what that means is that this cable is very flexible, but when it reaches body temperature it starts to heat up. The cable always returns to its original straight shape, so it's not like the standard cable that you would find in known building materials or whatever, it is a shape memory cable and what that means is that we attach the cable to each individual. support and you will see that we are putting colored ties on it right now.

These colored ties, although they are kind of cute and pretty, really their only purpose is to hold the wire to the braces, now you will see that this wire starts to distort as we move towards the more crooked teeth and this wire, like I said , once it reaches body temperature, it actually starts to return to its original straight shape, so over time that wire straightens the teeth that you can see are crooked or The wire that you can see is crooked, becomes straight and a As the wire becomes straight, the teeth become straight, so really the braces are just a handle on the tooth, the ligatures, those rubber colored rubber ties are nothing more than holding the wire to the handle. and the wire is what puts pressure on the teeth and makes the teeth move.

Now at this point she feels a little pressure from the wire, but again it is a very light flexible wire. We start with real light flexible wires and work up to some heavier and thicker rectangular wires, so the initial wires have a very light strength, but after about 3 to 4 hours your teeth will start to feel sensitive, you don't want chewing anything hard so basically your death will be for the first three days of swallowing softer types of foods or foods okay there you go just watched some that give you a little clip of what it was like to get your braces off now obviously , that was a short little version of reality from start to finish, it's probably necessary.

It takes us about an hour to put on braces and do everything from start to finish, so it's a little longer than what you saw there, but we're not working with the patient all the time, so you're not sitting there with the raised mouth. and your cheek was stretched for the whole hour, but it takes about an hour to do everything now. One of the things you notice is that we don't have needles, there are no needles, it's all about poking, there's no blood, there's no crying or anything like that, it's a pretty relaxed deal when we talk about the whole thing.

Now there are some points that you can't talk about because we have your cheek stretched out and your tongue sort of held back, but really all the time. you should just be pretty relaxed about this whole thing. I don't know, we put Paige on, we put braces on patients as young as six or seven and you know it's really not a hard thing to go through now. I'll say it next time. A couple of days after braces, that's a little harder, that's when your teeth are going to hurt, but in our office there really isn't much pain, well, you're in the office, most of the pain and teeth .

The pain is more of a dull ache than a sharp one and usually occurs a day later, maybe at the earliest four hours after an appointment, but during the appointment itself you can look quite relaxed quite easily and, again, it shouldn't be much. . of worries about what's going to happen here at the office I'm glad you watched it I hope you got something out of it I hope watching that video put your mind at ease We can't wait to get your braces on It should be a great experience for you We hope to do it for you you