How do braces move teeth?
One of the questions we often get asked is ‘how do braces move teeth?’ This is a great question, the answer to which will help explain a lot of what we do and what you might experience during treatment.
Teeth are constantly subjected to pressure from your tongue, lips and cheeks. If your tongue pushes on the inside of your top teeth, this can sometimes cause them to stick out, a frequent problem we deal with and something our patients are keen to correct.
The same principle applies in orthodontics, in order to be able to move a tooth, we need to apply constant and gentle pressure. To do this, we glue a bracket to the tooth and use wires and elastics to guide the tooth into the correct position.
The bracket has a small slot in which the arch wire sits and four small wings which supports the elastic ring we use to hold the wire in the bracket. When you first start treatment, the light and flexible wire creates a small gentle force on the tooth which causes pressure in the direction of the desired movement.
This gentle pressure causes something called bone remodelling where special cells soften the bone where the pressure is applied allowing the tooth to move a fraction of a millimetre in the right direction. You may be wondering what happens to the space in the bone that the tooth used to occupy. In this case, different special cells cause the bone to reform and grow. This results in your tooth moving through the bone into a new position.
Teeth move quite slowly and it is a mistake to think lots of pressure will help them to move faster. This is not the case, orthodontics relies in gentle continuous pressure which is why treatment can take many months. We are moving teeth in many different directions and this all takes time.
Part of the planning of your treatment looks at all the movements that are necessary and in what order. Sometimes we need to create extra space for a tooth to move into and then close up the space once the adjoining tooth has moved into the correct position.
We also spend a lot of time making sure your top and bottom teeth line up well as this makes your final result not only look great but more stable as you bite together.
We don’t only use wires to move teeth, sometimes elastics are used as well. These apply gentle forces in different directions that we cannot achieve with the wires on their own. In another post, we will explain the different types of elastics and how we use them to help move your teeth.
We hope this answers your question and please do let the team know if you would like to know anything else about how braces move your teeth.