Clear aligners apply pressure to move your crooked, crowded, or misaligned teeth from their original position to a desired one. The process results in perfectly aligned or straightening teeth and gives you a healthy and beautiful smile. It also solves a number of problems such as speech impairment, bite, chewing, and breathing issues, and takes care of overall oral hygiene. Now, by saying misaligned teeth and their correction, we mostly refer to upper teeth. But what if there’s a glitch in the bottom teeth, and it needs to get straightened? Can clear aligners do the job? The answer is yes, and here’s how to go about it…

Bottom teeth and malocclusion

Crooked bottom teeth are generally the result of overcrowding. Hence, despite straight upper teeth, sometimes your smile gets affected due to the misaligned bottom teeth. Some of the common causes for misaligned bottom teeth are:

• Your mouth is too small
• You lower jaw is narrow
• Early loss of milk teeth
• Your upper jaw and lower jaw are not aligned to each other
• Childhood habits such as thumb sucking and overuse of pacifiers
• Jaw injury

The outcome can be many like difficulty in maintaining oral hygiene, unhealthy gums due to overcrowding, and wear and tear of the teeth. In-person orthodontic treatment is the only way to treat such issues and clear aligner is definitely one of the best ways.

Clear aligners for the win

Your orthodontist is the best person to assess whether your malocclusion can be treated with clear aligners or not after he has gone through x-rays and scans of your teeth and jaw. Once decided that clear aligners can fix your problem, a series of plastic trays are custom-made to fit your bottom teeth. Every week, you need to change into a new aligner to keep shifting the teeth to the desired position. However, certain issues need to be taken care of while using clear aligners to straighten your bottom teeth only. An ideal smile is one where the top and bottom arches are in line with each other. Thus, if the upper teeth are straight and only the bottom teeth need fixing, then it may result in bite issues that were otherwise not there. To avoid any such adverse situation, it is ideal to let your orthodontist decide the course of the treatment and do what is best for your case.