My Invisalign Blog

My Invisalign Braces Experience

Invisalign Dentist Or Orthodontist? Which Is The Best Invisalign Provider?

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One of the topics that I get more questions about than any other on this blog is finding an Invisalign dentist or orthodontist. My own search for an Invisalign dentist or orthodontist took visits to several providers before I was able to find someone that I liked that was willing and able to treat me.

How To Remove Invisalign Image of Invisalign dentist or orthodontist

Invisalign dentist or orthodontist. Does it matter?

One of the things that surprises me the most when I am asked this is that many people don’t understand the difference between a dentist and an orthodontist. The easiest way to explain it is to compare it to doctors. A dentist is the equivalent of a GP. They do general dentistry; sometimes this includes some orthodontics. In many countries they aren’t allowed to call themselves orthodontists but get around this by using the word “orthodontics” or similar in their advertising. By comparison an orthodontist is like a specialist doctor such as a cardiologist, except that they specialise in the movement of teeth. In most countries orthodontists have done substantial additional study at university (often several years) and generally do nothing but orthodontic work in their practices.

invisalign inInvisalign is available through both dentists and orthodontists. Rather than having substantial orthodontic training, Invisalign providers are required to do an Invisalign course before they can offer Invisalign. It had never occurred to me to wonder exactly how extensive or otherwise this Invisalign training was.

Recently however, I was having a quick google to find some piece of Invisalign information or another and came across the following post from a dentist who is no longer offering Invisalign. To be honest, it terrified me.

As an avid reader of Invisalign forums I had known that Align (the makers of Invisalign) had been tightening up their systems to ensure that only more experienced providers of Invisalign kept offering it, but frankly what I read on the dentists blog terrified me.

For instance her assertion that she took a two day course to qualify in Invisalign and that:

“I graduated Temple dental in 2001 with little clue how to successfully and orthodontically move a tooth. Like most clinicians, I  learned little about orthodontics in dental school. Sure I bent some wires, took a gazillion alginates, uprighted some molars, and occasionally made an active or passive appliance. Requirements, however, were minimal and Ortho at Temple was always the ‘easy A.’”

must surely be a worry for people that are considering Invisalign through a general dentist.

Similarly I don’t know whether there is any truth in her statement:

“Invisalign approved nearly any case you sent. Even with unpredictable movements like extrusions, intrusions, rotations and difficult cases like open bites and cross-bites, Invisalign provided a successful clincheck. This of course was nonsense and after a few poor results, I quickly learned Invisalign’s limitations.”

but it certainly makes me glad that Align are tightening their policies. (incidentally, I wonder whether this blanket approval theory is still true; my orthodontist who is VERY experienced tells me that he gets cases refused regularly that he thinks he could treat)

All in all I think anyone who is interested in Invisalign should read this dentists post to make sure that they ask the right questions before choosing their provider.

As someone with a very complex case my preference for me is an orthodontist to do my treatment. However, I know that many, many people have had dentists do their Invisalign and they have done a fantastic job. The key to it seems to be that you absolutely have to ensure that your provider has experience of using Invisalign and lots of it and you should keep this foremost in your mind when choosing an Invisaling dentist or orthodontist. Fortunately, the Invisalign website ranks providers according to the number of cases they have undertaken recently. Still, it never hurts to ask the question yourself. I saw one provider who had not finished a single Invisalign case but was happy to take on my very complex issue. I would also point out that I think it is important to ask not only how many cases have been treated but also whether any cases similar to yours have been completed and how successful the results were. Ask to see before and after pictures where possible as these will tell you whether you would have been happy with the treatment.

Also, I think when deciding who to go with that it’s important to not just base your decision on what Invisalign costs from each provider. Certainly, if you have a very straightforward simple orthodontic issue you will probably find that you get a great result whoever does your treatment. If however, you have anything more complex you really need to consider who will be the best person to treat you. I know that many patients ring around hoping to get the best price- who doesn’t want to pay as little as possible? In more complex cases though, I think it is also vital that you take into account whether the cheapest provider is actually the best one for you in experience terms. Of course, that isn’t to say that more expensive means more experience- I often found the reverse to be true. Rather I just mean that experience should be just as, if not more, important than price in complex cases.

Invisalign- taking a break at Disney World

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OK, first things first. I have an apology to make. You see, I have spent the last month, gallivanting, for want of a better word and have sadly neglected my blog. My only defence is that I have had very limited opportunities to access the internet as I have flitted from Australia to the UK, over to the US, back to the UK for a week and then back to Australia. It’s a hard knock life…

With over 80 hours spent in the air and 28 nights away from my home this has presented me with a fair few challenges when it comes to Invisalign compliance. Challenges that I am sad to say that I have not risen to, exactly.

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t given up on my Invisalign by any stretch of the imagination, but the difficulties associated with cleaning my aligners whilst travelling, coupled with being in retention for my top arches whilst still in treatment for my bottom has meant that I have been very, very, very lax.

Invisalign on holiday - picture of my family.

Invisalign at Disney World – lots of junk food, not much aligner wearing!

Safe to say that it’s probably easier to tell you what I have done, rather than what I haven’t. I have worn my top aligners every night faithfully. The only exceptions to this have been the two 24 hour flights between Australia and the UK when I simply couldn’t figure out what was night and what was day and so I just wore them for odd random periods whilst I attempted to snatch a little bit of that junk sleep that you get on planes. I don’t think that I have always managed exactly 12 hours on every one of my 28 nights away, sometimes it may have been nearer to 10 and a half, but I have made up for it by forgetting that I am supposed to take my top aligners out on some days and so have worn them for the full 22 hours of my pre refinement days. .

(If my orthodontist is reading this, please, please, for both our sakes, stop here!)

OK, now for the bottom aligners. Regular readers will remember me telling you that I find it much more difficult to remember to wear the bottom aligners only. This is because I really don’t notice them at all; which must be a good thing, right? The downside is that several times I have taken them out at breakfast, merrily popping them into their case and then remembered at lunchtime that I had never put them back in. Oops.

Travelling in itself provides a fair few inconveniences when it comes to Invisalign. Firstly, no sooner had I got onto a plane than I would be offered a drink. This was lovely and with 8 or 10 boring hours ahead I wasn’t ready to decline it but it did require me to take my braces out even before take off. Having finished my drink there was no opportunity to get up and brush my teeth before we lifted off so I opted to leave them out, knowing that another drink would turn up just after take off. No sooner than I had finished that second drink I would see my lunch clattering it’s way down the aisle. Halfway through lunch my 6 year old would decide she was DESPERATE for the toilet and we would try and extricate ourselves from under our tray tables, clambering across seats sending cutlery and drinks flying to get there. Having worked through the balletic complexities of two people in one tiny plane toilet, one of them a 6 year old terrified of the roar that plane toilets make when they flush, then manoeuvred ourselves back through the aisles to the whole clambering, spilling routine again, I had had enough. By the time I had finally sat back down and finished my lunch I could barely be bothered to get up and line up for the toilet again just to brush my teeth.

On one particular flight I simply gave up and left them out altogether for 8 hours. They felt tight afterwards, but I got them in and hopefully no harm done. My appointment with my ortho next week will confirm that one way or another. I may be back here, tail between my legs having been ordered back several stages, but I am cautiously optimistic.

We spent one of our weeks at Disney World in Florida and I found this too a challenge. I figured we walked approximately 70 miles that week, criss crossing backwards and forwards across the parks, chasing rollercoasters and small over exuberant mice, so I reckoned this gave me licence to gorge myself on all the enormous buffets and junk food on offer- which I duly did. My reckoning was right because my waistline didn’t suffer; squeezing myself into my clothes was no more difficult than before. Squeezing my teeth into my trays however was a lot more difficult. I could tell that I had been less compliant than I normally am by the force required to get them properly seated on my teeth..

Of course, being on holiday and more relaxed that normal means that it is remarkably easy to convince yourself that you are actually doing what you are supposed to do. Sitting by the pool on a lounger flicking idly through a trashy mag I would tell myself that my orthodontist had expressly told me that I was not allowed to wear my aligners whilst swimming, so I was actually doing the right thing by not wearing them. I find it alarmingly easy to delude myself!

The good thing about this holiday is that I have come back full of energy and ready to attack things with a renewed vigour. This includes my invisalign wearing which I am now going to be so, so, so much more disciplined about. Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Will I make the medical journals? A little Invisalign IPR – Tooth Shaving

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My orthodontist seems like a nice guy. He is certainly experienced with Invisalign, is funny, reassuring and seems to know what he is doing. Generally he fills me with confidence. I must confess I wasn’t wild about his lectures to his postgrad students on my teeth being called “A silly thing to try and do with Invisalign” but I took it in fairly good heart. However, when at my latest visit he told me that if what he is trying to do to my teeth with Invisalign works, he will write about it for the medical journals, I really started to get nervous…

Invisalign IPR - Image of a guinea pig

I’m not so keen on being a guinea pig!

Funnily enough, I don’t like the sound of that. Not that I mind being in the medical journals- I have been in hundreds of magazines in my prior career as a model and presumably I wouldn’t be identified, so that isn’t a problem. Rather it is the feeling that I am some kind of orthodontic guinea pig that is scaring me.
Now I should be fair here. My orthodontist was extremely straightforward with me and told me from the outset that the tooth that I have at the bottom of my mouth would be very hard to move. See my clincheck here. He also warned me before treatment started that there was a good chance that it won’t move at all, and that even having created a space for it, it may just not move up into the place we make for it. If it does, I will need a fixed brace on that tooth and the ones next to it to get it to move. I know all that, and I accept it fully. If the tooth in question fails to move I will have that tooth extracted and either close the gap again or get some kind of implant tooth or similar.
I think what maybe I didn’t appreciate, however, was that it hadn’t really been tried before, or that if it worked it would be such a new technique for Invisalign it would make the medical journals! I thought it was more of a “this could be a bit tricky” scenario, rather than a “this might be a world first” Still, I am going to remain positive, nonetheless. Repeat after me….I believe that my teeth can move, I believe…
Other than scaring me half out of my wits the appointment went well however. He did a tiny bit of Invisalign IPR (filing between my teeth to make them close together tighter) even though it wasn’t on my schedule, just because he felt that two of my teeth were a little close together and might have difficulty moving past each other. I haven’t had Invisalign IPR before and it wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences but it wasn’t awful. He simply took some type of metal file and slid it into the gap between my teeth. He then moved it backwards and forwards between my teeth in a sawing action shaving a tiny bit of tooth off. There was a grinding, grating sensation, and it very definitely felt like he was shaving the sides of my teeth off, but there was absolutely no pain whatsoever. I spent the whole time a little petrified that he would somehow miss and file my gum, but that didn’t happen.
See below for a very quick video on what happens with Invisalign IPR:

Other than that everything is on track. I picked up sets 9-11 and will put set 9 in tonight. The great news is that comparing sets 1-11 I can definitely see some differences in the aligners now, so I shall post some pictures of that over the next couple of days.
Finally, thanks again to everyone for all your comments. I really enjoy getting them and knowing that people are actually reading this!

Platinum Elite Invisalign Orthodontists in Australia (Premier Provider Elite in the US)

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When I originally went looking for an orthodontist (read about the whole sorry saga here) one of my prerequisites was that my dentist should be an Invisalign Platinum Provider (Invisalign Premier provider in the US). At the time I was looking this seemed to be the blue chip of Invisalign orthodontics, a sign that the Doctor in question was one of the most experienced orthodontists or dentists in using the Invisalign system.

Then the other day whilst at my orthodontists I noticed a new plaque on his wall. This one congratulated him on being a Platinum Elite Invisalign provider. I was intrigued. Was this just another name for platinum providers, or had the fine people at Invisalign created a whole new tier for our goodly orthodontists to aspire to?
Well a quick search on the Invisalign website has enlightened me. Apparently a platinum provider is the name given for “Doctors who have a high level of Invisalign experience based on the number of patients treated” whilst Platinum Elite providers (Invisalign premier provider elite) are “Doctors who have the highest level of Invisalign experience based on the number of patients treated”
The receptionists at my orthodontists office also told me that Elite status is reassesssed regularly and only those orthodontists that complete enough cases on an ongoing basis retain the Elite title.
As a post script I have just found out that there are silver, gold, platinum and platinum elite providers in the Uk and some other countries!