Metal Mouth Message Board

Okay, it's my turn to whine! I just got my upper braces. Lower braces to come in 6 months, and upper & lower jaw surgery in a year or so. Quite to my surprise, my ortho decided that this would be a good time to install all the hooks they would need for surgery. Talk about advance-planning, here I am at least a year from surgery, and I already have hooks on 12 out of my 14 upper teeth! Is this normal, or does my ortho just have a sick sense of humor to make me deal with these things for an extra year for no reason?

That's really odd. Sorry.

If you mean the hooks on the brackets then i think you only get 1 set of brackets. So, if you need hooks at anytime in your treatment you have to get the brackets with hooks in the begining. If you mean some other kind of hooks then i have no idea. This is what i think, but im not an ortho.

Some of my brackets had little hooks on them from the beginning, and i had hooks for elastics added to the archwire after a few months, but my surgical hooks were only added 4 days before surgery so this is very weird to me.

Cant understand why they would need to put them on so early as all my ortho did was remove the archwire and slide the hooks on, then crimp them tightly into place.

If there definatley surgical hooks id want to know why theyve been put on already.

Sorry for the confusion... I have the self-ligating metal brackets, and the hooks are not on the wire, they are on the brackets - I have "normal" brackets on my front two teeth, and all the other teeth have brackets with hooks. The technician even double-checked with the ortho, because I guess she thought it was odd, and he said somethings like, "yes... that does say hooks on all teeth b/c she's a surgical case". Is this still weird?

Sounds like these are special brackets used for surgical cases.

Probably not normal (as in ordinary), but also not weird...does that make sense.

I had a total of 12 hooks in my mouth, but 8 of them were on molar brackets. Only had 4 on the archwire in the front.

That's interesting. I have self-ligating brackets...I currently have 20 hooks in my mouth--canines back to molars, 5 on each side, top and bottom. 8 of them were added to the archwire later in treatment, the rest come on the brackets. The ones that are twisted onto the archwire are a pain in the neck to clean around, so maybe that's why your ortho gave you hook brackets instead? Hang in there

I have had 18 hooks on since day 1. (going on 18 months now) I feel your pain! It was odd to me as well because I didn't have ANY hooks the first time I had braces. It was hard getting used to all the extra pokey stuff.

I agree with you meryaten, i thought it was fantastic to have my hooks on so near to surgery until afterwards, when my mouth was swollen and sore and still getting used to being poked at by the surgical hooks especially as post op i couldnt put wax over some of them as couldnt get to them.

Guess theres advantages to having them on early and getting used to them.