My Bite Feels Wrong During Invisalign Treatment, Should I Stop Using the Aligners?

I switched out to a new set of Invisalign aligners about a week ago and it feels like the new set is actually messing up my bite. My teeth feel like they’re getting pushed further out of alignment. That doesn’t make any sense. The whole point of getting Invisalign was to make my teeth straight and now who knows how they’ll end up. Should I stop wearing the aligners and call my dentist or should I keep going with them and see what happens?

Thanks,

Josh

Dear Josh,

Unlike a square box for a round pizza, a cat pushing a watermelon out of a lake or the infamous “duck face” there is actually a method to the madness of Invisalign.

The process can be likened to what happens when you rearrange a room in your home. You begin with a plan and start moving the furniture piece by piece. Most of us don’t live in mansions, so we often have to shimmy a piece or two out of the way in order to get another piece where we want it to be. If the changes you want to see aren’t drastic or there isn’t much furniture, it can be a neat and tidy process, but if you have a lot of pieces to move, there’s a good chance the sofa’s going to wind up in the kitchen while you work.

Your dentist took impressions to get precise measurements of where all of your teeth were and how they were positioned. These impressions were put into a computer and a new “design” for your teeth was created. Then, the computer calculated all the steps that would need to happen in order to make the new design happen. For each of these steps along the way, you have a new Invisalign aligner. While it may seem like total chaos is happening inside your mouth, each tooth is being moved and shifted in precisely the way it needs to be so that when you finish treatment, your smile looks exactly like the designer intended.

Along the way, you may feel like there’s a sofa in the kitchen, but you can rest assured that it will be exactly where it needs to be when the redesign is compete. Keep wearing your aligners as planned and in time your bite will feel how it should.

This blog is sponsored by Elgin dentist, Dr. Steve Sirin.