I'm now 20 weeks into my invisalign treatment (our of 96 weeks total) but am starting to get paranoid. I see nothing on this board except people for whom invisalign didn't work and they ended up having to get regular braces anyway. I'm partly attributing that to the fact that, in general, people are probably more likely to post when something doesn't work than when it does.
I assume SOMETHING is happening with my teeth because dental floss now fits in places it always broke before but, beyond that, I'm worried that I'll spend two years for nothing.
So, has anyone here had an invisalign SUCCESS, i.e. you finished your invisalign treatment and your teeth looked the way you wanted them to?
20 weeks into invisalign
Moderator: bbsadmin
I had invisalign for over a year and a half. The product worked great for the things that I cared about when I first paid for them: 1)they were, for the most part, invisible to the casual observer 2)they had hardly any effect on brushing and flossing except that I wound up doing a LOT more than before! 3)they straightened out the crowding on the bottom and moved my top molars out.
The problems I encountered and which ultimately drove me to get traditional braces centered around the fact that the orthodontist is only peripherally in the loop on the treatment. The computer figures out where everything ought to be, spits out the directions to the ortho and off you go. If things don't go exactly according to plan--and things NEVER go exactly according to plan--the ortho's potential to fine tune problems on the fly is drastically limited compared to wires, brackets, chains, elastics, etc.
In my case, I took one 6-week break awaiting new aligners cast from a new mold for my top teeth. When my bottom trays ran their course and the teeth still weren't exactly in the right place, I opted to go with metal on the bottom and leave the invisalign on the top. When the top trays became ill-fitting for the second time, I opted to punt on the whole process, bite the bullet and do what I should have done when I was a teenager.
Based on a single data point, in my less-than-expert opinion concerning orthodontia, I think invisalign is fantastic within its limitations. There's no doubt it moves teeth around and mostly in the right direction--my teeth certainly looked better when I quit than they did when I started, although I did wind up with the points of my molars on the left side hitting each other. There was no way, however, that invisalign was ever going to get my teeth to the perfect positions the way regular braces are.
The problems I encountered and which ultimately drove me to get traditional braces centered around the fact that the orthodontist is only peripherally in the loop on the treatment. The computer figures out where everything ought to be, spits out the directions to the ortho and off you go. If things don't go exactly according to plan--and things NEVER go exactly according to plan--the ortho's potential to fine tune problems on the fly is drastically limited compared to wires, brackets, chains, elastics, etc.
In my case, I took one 6-week break awaiting new aligners cast from a new mold for my top teeth. When my bottom trays ran their course and the teeth still weren't exactly in the right place, I opted to go with metal on the bottom and leave the invisalign on the top. When the top trays became ill-fitting for the second time, I opted to punt on the whole process, bite the bullet and do what I should have done when I was a teenager.
Based on a single data point, in my less-than-expert opinion concerning orthodontia, I think invisalign is fantastic within its limitations. There's no doubt it moves teeth around and mostly in the right direction--my teeth certainly looked better when I quit than they did when I started, although I did wind up with the points of my molars on the left side hitting each other. There was no way, however, that invisalign was ever going to get my teeth to the perfect positions the way regular braces are.
Boaster,
I agree with you - I had gotten invisalign before I read and found all these boards and got pretty concerned. But I figure every case is different - I am now on aligner 13 out out 24 and am so happy. 2 teeth that I was unhappy with are already fixed and now I just want one more to get into place. I'm hoping for the best that everything goes well as I am not going down the real braces route. I will 100% be posting lots of places about the positive experience I have had so far and hopefully at the end as well. Just keep positive!
I agree with you - I had gotten invisalign before I read and found all these boards and got pretty concerned. But I figure every case is different - I am now on aligner 13 out out 24 and am so happy. 2 teeth that I was unhappy with are already fixed and now I just want one more to get into place. I'm hoping for the best that everything goes well as I am not going down the real braces route. I will 100% be posting lots of places about the positive experience I have had so far and hopefully at the end as well. Just keep positive!
I think a lot of people have problems on here that Invisalign cannot fix, thats why it would tend to get a negative wrap. For me it was never an option as much as I would have liked it to be. If it can fix little problems (and I have seen it certainly can) then wonderful! wish it could have done mine!
It's true that invisalign can't handle a variety of different orthodontic problems. For instance, I knew going in that it wouldn't be able to rotate a bicuspid that needed to pivot about 90 degrees. It didn't affect my bite as it was, and it made no difference cosmetically, so I went with it. Everything else I needed done was a matter of straightening as opposed to pulling down, widening the palette, etc.
The wild card is that how fast your teeth move and how difficult they are to move is not constant across the population. I'm no orthodontist as I've mentioned before, but my assumption is that there are several variables such as bone density and teeth root structure among others that determine how an individual will respond to orthodontic work. If you're wearing traditional braces, the doctor can make changes dynamically based on what he sees. If you're wearing invisalign and your teeth aren't keeping up with the trays, the doctor has a limited tool kit available to get you on track. If he can't, I can tell you from experience that it's about a six week break in training while you wait for for the new trays to come in. In my case, it was six weeks in which my "invisible" braces were far from it because of the empty space that one of my front top teeth should have been filling.
The wild card is that how fast your teeth move and how difficult they are to move is not constant across the population. I'm no orthodontist as I've mentioned before, but my assumption is that there are several variables such as bone density and teeth root structure among others that determine how an individual will respond to orthodontic work. If you're wearing traditional braces, the doctor can make changes dynamically based on what he sees. If you're wearing invisalign and your teeth aren't keeping up with the trays, the doctor has a limited tool kit available to get you on track. If he can't, I can tell you from experience that it's about a six week break in training while you wait for for the new trays to come in. In my case, it was six weeks in which my "invisible" braces were far from it because of the empty space that one of my front top teeth should have been filling.