Orthodontic Day for One Diva

Mistie and I placed braces on Heather today after she had her interview with Atlanta's CBS TV show, Better Mornings Show with host Tracye Hutchins. Heather has a bite problem, called a psuedo-class III, where the lower teeth hit the upper incisors and that causes the lower jaw to come forward abnormally when she closes, making it appear that she has a "bulldog bite" or as some say, a "Jay Leno bite". What she actually has is not an over-sized lower jaw, like Leno, but rather a deflecting contact on her tooth in the front that makes her jaw slide forward and just appear to be an underbite, bulldog bite.

We are correcting that with orthodontics....and it will be amazing to see the difference in just a few months. Imagine, a solution for a lifetime of biting off balance in just three or four months! In the photo to the right you can see us applying the blue gel that etches the surface of the tooth which in turn give us the ability to attach orthodontic brackets to the teeth for a period of time.

We also want to let you know that the Atlanta Channel 46 CBS video TV segment has been put on the calendar to air on Tuesday March 23^rd.

^{If all goes as planned it will air during the Better Mornings Atlanta show from 5am till 7am at about 5:50am. And the last ten minutes of each of the following shows… the 12noon, the 4pm the 6pm and the 11pm as well.}

Later that day there will be a link to the story on our website on this page…

http://www.cbsatlanta.com/gooddeeds/index.html

After we place the brackets on the teeth, aligning the slots of the brackets so that the teeth move in the desired direction once the flexible orthodontic wire is placed in the mouth, her teeth will begin to move to the correct position and her underbite will gradually be corrected as the teeth move through the bone. Orthodontics works because teeth move through bone when small, constant pressure is applied to a tooth. The jaw bone actually is resorbed on one side of the tooth and is laid down on the other side as the tooth

literally migrates through the solid bone.

Because the lower teeth are in front of the upper teeth, we needed to bring the lower teeth back. This involved removing one tooth and making the size of the arch smaller, like having a smaller diameter circle in effect, so that the lower arch can fit inside the normal upper jaw. Make sense? Orthodontics is about spacial relationships, geometry and is one of the main reasons high school students have to know that stuff...in case they one day become dentists!