Traditional braces - friend's glad she never wore them

I went to dinner at a friend's place last night and we started talking about how much her crooked teeth bothered her. I started talking about what I've read lately, that you shouldn't extract and/or retract teeth in orthodontics because it can damage the profile, the bite, the position of the tongue and the position of the jaw joint (TMJ) but that this is still done in many cases. She was shocked and said, "Are you SERIOUS?" I told her about Weston A. Price and how he found the reason for crooked teeth and that traditional orthodontics don't take care of the real problem and can make everything worse.

Then I told her that you will usually need bonded retainers on the back of the teeth for the rest of your life to keep them from shifting since the result is so unstable. "Are you SERIOUS?" she said again. She couldn't let the topic go. The more I told her the happier she was that she had never worn (traditional) braces.

Later we started talking about children and that they often wait until they are fully grown here in Sweden which is the wrong thing to do. She had relatives that had to wear braces and pull out an eye tooth (a canine tooth coming in in the roof of the mouth) and when I told her that kind of scenario can often be avoided if you guide the growth of the jaws at an early age she was really surprised that more people aren't aware of this.

We then started measuring each other's intercanine width and laughed like little girls. "Ok, let's measure yours, oh my, your upper jaw is too small!" "Are you supposed to have that big of a jaw, that's huge!" (The norm is 40 mm for both men and women.) We measured the distance between the nose and the front teeth (according to Dr. Hang and Orthotropics practitioners). Her distance was too big but mine was of course bigger. We laughed again. But then we got serious once more. We discussed how I'm going to reach out to people? I don't know if most people wouldn't care about their health to get straight teeth but that they might not disregard the fact that these retraction methods cause double chin, bigger nose, damaged profile and treatment relapse? I gave her some links for further research.

Imagine if this could have been avoided at an early stage. I'm sure this person would've been thrilled.

Face damaged by orthodontics

I will gladly admit it: My face was damaged by orthodontics. It's alright, I can talk about it now without having too many feelings of anxiety.

Thankfully, I'm quite cool about my looks. I have come to realize that my appearance - and with that I'm referring to everything from eyes, forehead, lips, chin and face shape - has been affected by on the one hand the initial malocclusion and then, as the experts put it, been "damaged" even more by orthodontics.

But I can't let this break me. I am pleased with the way I look, I realize that would never be a super model anyway and I intend to live my life happy despite what happened. I will try to avoid "what if...?" thoughts because that's not the way life goes. Instead I'm almost grateful that this happened to me because that way I might be able to inform and help others. It’s in my nature.

It has been hard since this proved to be a bigger topic than I could've ever imagined and the risks associated with some of the orthodontic treatments are far more serious than I first thought. Still it is very interesting! I'm lucky to have been able to preserve my composure. I could have gotten really depressed but I somehow didn’t.

When I first started researching this I found the whole topic extremely disturbing. But I decided to face my fears, for other peoples' sake too. I read that, "adults with problems due to extraction orthodontics often have difficulties putting words to what they feel". I used to say that "it doesn't feel like my mouth anymore", that it was "diffucult to bite my teeth together" which are both very vague statements, especially when my teeth look fine to someone who is not aware of the debate. It has proved almost impossible to explain to a doctor. When I visited the American orthodontist, they said, "ok, maybe your jaw muscles are a bit weak?" and I can't blame them for thinking that. But the truth is that the mouth is too small for the tongue, the dental arch has an abnormal shape and the positions of the jaws are wrong - especially the lower jaw is too far back. And these are the causes of my bite being wrong, it's no mystery anymore.