Metal Mouth Message Board

Hi - I have a canine thats placed slightly above my other teeth. It has to be lowered into place - how is this achieved with braces? I can see teeth being rotated, pushed or pulled into place, but how can they be lowered??

Will I need... ...elastics???

my ortho is gonna use triangle shaped elastic configurations.

I imagine it could be done with elastics. In my case, my ortho "stepped down" the archwire by putting bends in it. In other words, instead of your archwire looking like this ------------------, it would end up looking like this ----------\__/----------

I'm moving the canines with step down wires and the triangle elastics (heavy, heavy, heavy).

I had two "fangs" (canines) in their own row above my other teeth. They were brought down by keeping me in the thin (very malleable) wires for a couple of months and assigning me triangle pattern elastics (the top of the triangle was on my upper canine, then the lower points were my lower canine and a molar) on each side.

It worked very quickly, and the results pleasing.

Once Ruth (my impacted canine) was pulled sideways across my palate and got close enough they attached her bracket to the archwire, and every few weeks they moved the bracket higher on the tooth. The wire would be bent about 45 degrees when they attached it and after about 2 weeks it would be straight. Then they would move the bracket up and do it again. They moved the bracket about 3 times.

Fantastic - as long as theres another option to the dreaded elastics!!!

Thanks all!!

I have a really wonky tooth in the way back upper left and it kinda looks like:


^^^^^^^^^
_|__|__|---|__|

(I'm an arteest!)

Anyways, they put a "lingual button" on the back side of the tooth in front of it and had banded the wonky tooth and used a powerchain to pull it down some. She says next time that they will try to include it on the archwire.

There might be half a dozen ways to do it, I don't know, but I am sure your Ortho has a plan!