Teeth that are shifting

I've come across many forums where people complain about shifting of teeth after braces have been removed. Either they forgot to wear their retainer or the bonded retainer wire on the back of their teeth fell off. It surprises me that almost no-one asks why this happens. Are we just supposed to accept that this is how things work? I remember questioning this before I did my major research. I used to say to myself, "What's up with this, an unstable result? What have I let them do to my mouth?" I at least wish they would've explained things before treatment. Some people still don't get this information and it's upsetting to me. In my opinion having to wear a retainer for the rest of your life involves a big risk. Let's say I go on a trip where I travel for more than 24 hours and my sleep is irregular for a week or so due to jetlag. Or if I get a kid and forget to wear the retainer for  a couple of nights because of the chaos that occurs. Or if the bonded retainer falls off while you're on a trip (I had this happen recently).

Before I did my research I asked a dentist about shifting of teeth after the wire fell off and she told me the whole thing is one big experiment. Orthodontists ask themselves if the number of years you wear the retainer is related to whether they will shift or not. After reading a lot about the topic I found a whole bunch of American websites that stated that if you don't solve the jaw problems (that almost always seem to be the culprit to begin with) the amount of time that you wear the retainer will be of no importance and that life-long retention is the safest. I would rather solve the underlying problems! Such techniques exist too, and they have been available for decades. But instead they choose to aggravate the problem. Seeing it from that perspective, I don't blame the teeth for wanting to return to their original position! ;)
 

I found a blog written by a person who lost her retainer and her teeth started shifting right away. She went back to the orthodontist to consult them and they said they made a mistake by not removing teeth because of crowding. Like that was the reason for the shifting. Where did that statement come from, was it just a wild guess? From what I've heard risk of shifting increases if you have teeth pulled. This is because the dental arches are made smaller leading to decreased tongue space among other things.
 

How about at least providing the patient with some theories. Or are they trying to evade the fact that they ignored a big problem with the mouth that still remains?

Retainer forever? We'd prefer teeth that are not kept in place by a "bandaid"! 

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.