When it comes to Invisalign, one of the reasons I really promote Invisalign is we’re able to treat patients that have a bridge in their mouth or they have an implant. With braces, you can’t. You can’t put forces on a bridge and forces on an implant, or otherwise it can compromise the implant or bridge. But with Invisalign, we have control over the movements of each individual tooth. With Invisalign, we pick which teeth are going to move. We pick how far they’re going to move, and what movements are going to happen on each individual tooth. And so we’re able to hold one tooth still, and we can move the other tooth right next to it, which allows us to treat patients that have restorative work already that may otherwise prevent them from being able to straighten teeth.
Another thing I like about Invisalign is when we’re doing restorative work, a lot of times we combine Invisalign with a cosmetic restorative work. We may be doing Invisalign, and then doing some veneers. We’re able to move the teeth exactly where we are. There are times where if a patient has small teeth, and we want to position them to do crowns on them to replace or make the teeth larger than they are, we’re able to specifically put them exactly where we want them, allowing us the right amount of space to make symmetrical teeth on both sides of the arch. Whereas when you’re doing braces, it’s all based on putting a spring in there, and trying to move the tooth over a little bit. “Oh, we went too far. Let’s put a spring in and push it back this way.” There’s a lot of just trying to get it close to that. Whereas when it comes to Invisalign, we can be more precise in the position of those teeth.
