Orthodontist: More than Braces

An orthodontist is a dentist in one of nine recognized specialties of the American Dental Association. They focus on the diagnosis, corrective devise application and maintenance device recommendations for their patients who range from children to middle age adults. Yet, they are misunderstood.

Men and women often experience their crooked, crowed, gapped and misaligned teeth by the time their secondary teeth come in. Some people put up with the discomfort and others need the intervention of dental corrective devices in order to alleviate pain and straighten out things for good with braces perhaps.

However, an orthodontist can offer more than just the application of and the painful tightening of those braces. They are the specialists that work to keep you out of dental surgery.

Irregularities and misalignment of the teeth are all responsibilities of an orthodontist. They are the dental professionals who try every non-surgical option to keep a child, teen or adult's teeth from having to be removed through invasive surgery. Although these dental professionals are associated with a lot of pain, they try to prevent wisdom tooth, crooked and twisted tooth pain with gradual repositioning that can be performed with in office treatments. There job isn't just about braces, although that is a large part of how they can bring about full mouth changes and teeth realignment for life time change. There methods also include opening the gums to manually straighten the tooth from the base or gradually use braces to reposition teeth for easier extraction if that is the only way to completely alleviate pain. Did you know that there are several different kinds of braces not just silver metal or the well-known plastic trays?

Braces are typically prescribed and applied to children and teen's teeth, but it is a growing trend for adults to have them applied as well. Braces come in the traditional form of metal, ceramic and gold; Invisalign clear plastic trays; self ligating braces that do not need bands or ties to hold the wire in place so they require less frequent dentist visits and easy to clean; and lingual braces that are placed on the inner surface of the teeth and are 'invisible' to others. On one hand, an orthodontist typically works with children who require a variety of brace applications for the multitude of bite alignment and tooth malocclusions that they encounter during development. On the other hand, adults can also utilize the 'invisible' braces or mouth guards that can straighten their teeth without being as visible or cumbersome as traditional metal braces. An orthodontist is a useful resource with any alignment concern.