WHAT IS THE NEXT STEP AFTER I'VE FINISHED MY TREATMENT?
WHAT IS THE NEXT STEP AFTER I'VE FINISHED MY TREATMENT?
RETENTION From DIGITAL ORTHODONTICS - Solo Edition by Dr. Bak Nguyen
Not so fast, have you really finished your treatment? Are you sure? Just so you know, the visual results are usually in much sooner than the end of the treatment itself. Just make sure that you have confirmed with your attending that you have completed your treatment.
Now that it is confirmed, you are out of treatment. Out of treatment but still, you will have to wear your night retainers... for life. You heard me, for life. There is no way to sugarcoat this, you will have to wear retention for as long as you want to keep your teeth aligned.
If you don't, they will not move overnight but within a few months, you will start to see crowding occurs, and within a few years, you are back to where you started, unless you had teeth extracted or orthognathic surgery. Even then, the relapse will not be as much but crowding will still occur.
Let me explain why this phenomenon happens and why it is perfectly natural. The cartilage of your body will grow. Younger, this is how you grew. In adulthood, most of your cartilages have changed into hard bone and will stop growing. On your face, there are still 3 points of cartilage that will keep growing with time: the ears, the nose, and the chin.
Look at anyone, through time, these are the features that keep growing. It's normal, it's human. Actually, the chin is hard bone, the fact that you see it advancing (growing) is because of the other end of that bone, the condyles. At the level of the condyles, there is cartilage that will keep growing through the years.
Younger, that was how we all grew. Look at an average kid, you will see that his or her chin is way behind his or her upper jaw. With the years, the lower jaw is catching up. Well, at an adult age, the same phenomenon continues, only at a much slower rate. This example excludes the kids with class 3 protrusive jaw. But even then, you can see that the lower jaw is growing through time.
So growing older, your lower jaw will advance, causing the lower front teeth to collapse with the back of the upper front teeth. To compensate, your lower front teeth will start shifting and collapsing, resulting in crowding. As this happens, the upper front teeth will slowly match the crowding of the lower front teeth. That is due to the balance of the forces between the lips pushing your teeth back and the tongue pushing them forward until the teeth find support one on another.
That's how we grow old, that's because we are humans and alive! That said, it is possible to prevent this crowding to happen. The remedy is to wear your night retention to keep the alignment of the teeth and to put them back in as they move. Every 4-5 years, you will have to see your attending to verify the pressure built-up into your front teeth and release that.
No worries, it is a simple matter of getting a sand band to loosen your contacts and to proceed to a new scan to make your next pairs of night retentions. That process will have to be repeated every 4-5 years to compensate for the growth of your lower jaw.
In short, you are wearing retention for life because you are human and alive. If you stop, crowding and relapse will occur within months, maybe even weeks. That's because your lower jaw keeps growing. Wearing night retentions and having your attending to adjust your contacts every 4-5 years will keep your teeth aligned.
By the way, a fixed lingual wire at the back of your teeth will not solve the problem permanently. As the pressure is building up, the wire will eventually break or detach. Then, you will have to ru to your attending to release the built-up pressure and make new retention.
Now you have the whole story.