Metal Mouth Message Board

So I finally found out that I can get Invisalign for my open bite yay! I'm going on Thursday to get my final impressions taken. But I do have to have rubberbands with my Invisalign in order to correct my bite. My ortho explained that I will have about 4 small buttons attached to sides of my teeth and holes will be cut in my Invisalign trays, and rubberbands will be attached to these buttons. I'm wondering about how long I will have to have these. He said overall the whole process will take about a year, and I will have to wear the rubberbands just untill my bite gets to a good place and is not popping (I have TMJ). I'm thinking 4-6 months, any ideas? But I'm wondering has anyone had rubberbands with their Invisalign before? What did you have yours for, and what was it like, and did it hurt?

I started a post last July called "elastics". There is a picture in there of how it looked with mine and why I got them. If yours will be to correct the bite, then it will probably connect the top teeth to the bottom instead of wrapping around individual teeth. But, you can get the idea about how the attachments will look to loop the elastics around and the amount of aligner they take away in the picture.

Did they hurt? Not at all. But, I found the elastics to be an absolute pain in the butt on the annoyance and aesthetic factors after wearing them for 5 or so weeks. Plus, they didn't really do what they were supposed to do. They have to be taken out before the aligners can come off which is rather annoying when you just want to yank the aligners off quickly. And they were so close to the front that it made me less satisfied with Invisalign. They has a yellow tint to them and since my teeth don't, they pretty well stuck out like a sore thumb. And since they are not normal looking as elastics with braces are, it just drew more attention to me. I had gone through almost the entire treatment without elastics and no one noticed/said anything until those last 5 or so weeks.

This is certainly not true of everyone but my TMJ went away very quickly after starting treatment without elastics. I was so used to it that it took awhile before I noticed that my jaw didn't pop anymore but that was very early in my treatment.

My ortho was ready to call it done and make retainers even after acknowledging that the elastics did help but didn't completely fix the issue after the 5 or so weeks with elastics. The first aligner series made it so my bite was off because one tooth on bottom was bumping up against the top thus preventing my back teeth from touching. This didn't have anything to do with what the elastics were supposed to fix. But, since I was not satisfied with my bite, we just took new impressions for a refinement series (which would also address the issue that the elastics were supposed to fix) and got rid of the elastics. I have 3 aligners in the refinement series left and my bite is certainly improving to a near perfect state. My refinement series is 7 aligners. So, obviously, it really was not done after I was finished with the elastics. I am much more satisfied now that I am back to regular Invisalign and got rid of those darn elastics!