The science behind braces in Colchester
As you look in the mirror at your wonky teeth, do you think that because you are an adult you can no longer get them straightened? Teeth get set into the jaw and can’t be moved, right? Well, no, wrong, actually. Teeth are not exactly set into the jaw and they can be moved, no matter how old you are, with braces in Colchester.
Your teeth are secured into sockets in your jawbone by the bone, which is packed tightly around them and thousands of tiny fibres. They are separate from the bone, and that’s why they can wobble around and fall out. Moving teeth is simply a matter of using sustained pressure to change the bone around the teeth. Braces in Colchester here at Hello Dental provide that pressure.
The physiology of teeth straightening
When we apply even pressure for more than 72 hours to your teeth, the bone in your jaw responds to get rid of the pressure. It does this by dissolving the bone cells in front of the direction of the pressure, to ease it, and by simultaneously building new bone behind the direction of the pressure, to stop the tooth from becoming wobbly. It’s very clever, but it does require pretty much constant pressure for it to work. And bone can only dissolve and rebuild itself so fast, and that’s why teeth straightening takes time.
That said, modern braces tend to take quite a bit less time than the old-fashioned treatments. These could take two or three years because they were also realigning the jaws, in teenagers usually.
Modern braces for adults do not even bother with jaw realignment, which cannot be done after about age 18 as the bones have set hard. Instead, they focus on realigning wonky teeth, so treatment with braces such as Fastbraces can be completed in 3-12 months, depending on the alignment issues.
There are also clear aligners, we use ClearCorrect, for some misalignment issues. These can be removed for eating and cleaning teeth but must be in situ for 20-22 hours a day to keep up that constant pressure we referred to above.
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