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Thumb Sucking…Orthodontic Concerns

September 14th, 2012
Thumb sucking baby

Babies are born with a reflex to suck any object placed in their mouth.  This behavior helps during the first few months of establishing feeding, and disappears at around 4 months. Thumb sucking however, is not reflexive, and is believed to be a self-soothing practice.  There are usually no ill effects from thumb sucking in early childhood, and most children naturally give up the habit somewhere between 2-4 years of age.  However, if thumb sucking continues past the age of around 7 when adult teeth are coming through there can be misalignment of front teeth, or possibly exacerbation of underlying jaw ...

Time for a wire change?

March 13th, 2012

So now you have your braces, the wire has been fitted, and you have been called back to have a new wire fitted to start the tooth moving process. This short video explains how simple a wire change is – of course there is much more to it ‘behind’ the scenes – your orthodontist has to assess how much movement to initiate with each wire change, what gauge wire to use, whether any kinks or twists need to be added to the wire to get the movement required, reshaping of the wire and finally inserting and trimming to ensure you have ...

Unremarkable!

February 28th, 2012

As Henry progresses through his braces journey I find it quite an unremarkable experience! We attend our wire change appointments and have minor adjustments done as required, he is diligent with his brushing (which for a 16 year old boy is probably quite remarkable!), he wears his elastics as requested and strangely he does not complain…too much! I would regularly ask him about various tooth movements, or how things felt – complete with the knowledge myself of how each stage progressed – but typical of his age he was not particularly verbose in his replies. Similar thing when I asked his ...