This post may contain affiliate links and/or codes. You won’t pay anything extra, but I might make a commission.
[I am a member of the Invisalign Moms Advisory Board and am receiving complimentary Invisalign treatment.]
My bottom teeth used to look like this:
It looked like an unruly mob of teeth
And my top teeth used to look like this:
Thank goodness people usually didn’t see my top teeth from this angle!
Now thanks to Invisalign they look like this!
Gorgeous!
The difference is so big I still can’t believe it. I love looking at pictures of how they used to be, and then looking in the mirror.
But all that change can cause other problems, and you definitely want to choose an Invisalign provider who knows what he’s doing so that future problems can be avoided.
In that last picture, you can see that even though my teeth are now straight, the edges are not perfectly aligned. After almost 30 years of using those teeth, they adjusted themselves to their old, crooked bite. Straightening them out meant that my lower teeth weren’t hitting my upper teeth right anymore when I bit down.
Occlusal Adjustment
It was time for my occlusal adjustment.
According to my doctor, when you’re looking for an Invisalign provider you should ask if he or she does an occlusal adjustment as part of treatment. If they don’t, keep looking. Remember, once your teeth have moved to their new positions, they’re going to be hitting each other in new ways. Over time, if your new bite isn’t fixed, your teeth can knock each other out of place again. You do NOT want that to happen.
Dr. Hung had me bite down on a piece of carbon. Wherever the marks on my teeth were heaviest, he filed those places down a little bit. Then he had me bite down on carbon again, to see the progress, and repeated this four or five times until he was confident that there weren’t any places that were hitting badly. He told me to take my new bite for a spin and let him know if any teeth feel like they’re not touching correctly.
Dr. Hung used a succession of rubber tips to hone my teeth where they weren’t hitting each other well. The black strip on the bottom is the carbon that I bit down on, to show him where the trouble spots were.
But so far so good! Everything feels great.
Button Removal
I also got my “buttons” removed. Sometimes when your teeth need to be moved or turned in a way that will be difficult for the Invisalign trays to “grab,” you need attachments – little bumps that get attached to your teeth to give your trays something to grab onto.
I had eight or nine of them.
See those little bumps sticking out from my bottom teeth on the left, near my finger? Those were some of my attachments.
They never bothered me – none were on my front teeth and I barely noticed them. But when I smiled wide they were noticeable in a way that the Invisalign trays aren’t. Now, though, my teeth have reached their destinations (yay!) so the attachments were no longer necessary.
Getting them off was very easy: Dr. Hung wore them down using something that was harder than the attachments but softer than my teeth. That way there was no danger of damaging my teeth getting the attachments off. The whole thing was really easy and took about ten minutes. There’s absolutely no trace of them left.
I still have about three weeks to go of wearing my aligners all day, and then I get to drop down to 18 hours a day for a month. That change will be HUGE – it will mean that if I’m going out to eat, I can leave my aligners at home and not have to worry about them at all!
I’m so close to the end. This is so exciting!
I am a member of the Invisalign Moms Advisory Board. I am receiving complimentary Invisalign treatment as part of this program. All opinions are my own and based on my own treatment experience. Full disclosure can be found here: http://shout.lt/ggGP
A. Leung
Wednesday 9th of August 2017
I have a question, how long was your overall treatment? My teeth are similar to yours with the overcrowding. They told me a year but I feel like it will be longer than that, and how long did it take for you to see some changes/movement? Thank you!
Amy Oztan
Monday 14th of August 2017
All-in it was about 18 months, but the last 4-5 months were stepping down how long I was wearing my trays (from 22 hours per day to just at night), and making final adjustments where my teeth were rubbing against each other in their new positions. HOWEVER, I do know that in the years since I got my treatment, Invisalign has been recommending faster changes to new trays, so it's totally possible that what took me 18 months could be faster now!