Invisalign – Do you really have to wear them for the recommended 22 hours?

In short – No you don’t. 18 hours a day should do the trick. Which is good because how Invisalign ever thought that 22 hours would be possible for anyone , I really don’t know. Unless of course you are one of those people who can just eat one meal a day. A man basically! Clearly Invisalign was invented by men. Any woman would have known that 22 hours a day was a non starter and would have gone straight back to the drawing board.

The eating regime of the average women goes a bit like this: Breakfast, another cup of tea/coffee, mid morning snack, more tea coffee, lunch, tea/coffee, further snack, early evening drinks and nibbles, dinner, chocolate. That would leave about 2 hours a day when your aligners are actually in. That won’t quite work either. So a bit thought and discipline needs to go into it but you don’t need to hit 22 hours.

You will have heard of the Invisalign diet. It’s not imaginary, it’s real. I lost about 5 lbs in the first 5 days through starving myself because I couldn’t get enough food down me quickly enough to get the aligners back in so I could stick to the recommended 22 hours. Clearly I wasn’t going to last the full course if I carried on like that. So I needed a plan.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner was an absolute minimum. So the routine goes like this: Coffee first thing in the morning. Then teeth are cleaned and the aligners go back in. Breakfast is as soon as I get into the office and they are out for a maximum of 30 minutes. Finding time to go and rinse the aligners before putting them back in is the difficult part but that just has to be done.

I could not get through a working day without lunch and I allow myself up to one hour without the aligners in middle of the day. And then they are back in until I get home in the evening. Evenings are my grazing time when the aligners are out for about 3 to 4 hours and I get to stuff myself with the junk food I have denied myself all day.

The main problem with this routine is that the 21st century office seems to be characterised by a never ending conveyer belt of junk food; cakes, biscuits, muffins, doughnuts. Any birthday, celebration, key date seems to involve treats etc. Rarely doe s a day go by when there isn’t something to celebrate and cakes aren’t being handed round. You will soon learn that you won’t be having any (unless you save your cake for lunch time). Grazing is simply not an option on the Invisalign diet. You will learn the art of self denial.

If you are a 10 cups of tea or coffee a day sort of person you will also have to have a rethink as it is not recommended to drink anything hot with the aligners in and of course both tea and coffee stain and would seep into them and it would be revolting.

In fact, Invisalign say the only thing you can drink apart from water is white wine so why not try substituting the tea or coffee in your day for white wine. J

Janice – Invisalign.

22 months in and I should have been finished in 16 months.

And if I wasn’t so damned particular and wanted all of my teeth straightened I would probably have been finished in the 16 months original quoted.

But having spent 3 years researching, having consultations, considering and generally procrastinating, I am that difficult patient that actually wants all of my teeth straightened and not just most of them.

I should say at this point that most of what has been promised has been delivered, painlessly and effortlessly.   All the problems I had read about with Invisalign; mostly pain and difficulty in removing the aligners haven’t been my experience at all.   The bulk buying of pain killers before I started wasn’t necessary,  not even a twinge of pain at any time, just the mildest of sensitivity on a few of the teeth a few times.  Nothing  to complain about at all.  The aligners  go in and come out easily, the special Invisalign ‘Outies’ I bought on-line to help you to remove them have not been used.

The results overall  are amazing.  Over bite, under bite, open bite all corrected and now I have the perfect bite.  All teeth (bar one) are lined up like soldiers and apart from the obvious aesthetic improvement my mouth feels a lot more comfortable than it did before.

The problem for me is just one tooth, centre front at the bottom,  which was set back from the rest due to overcrowding.  It is still not perfectly aligned despite three re-moulds and three  completely new sets of aligners over 22 months just because of this one problem.

There simply was not enough space for all my teeth on the bottom.  I addressed this point with the dentist right at the beginning and was assured that Invisalign could manage this with some filing down to create the much needed space.

Filing down was done but after 8 months the first batch of braces started failing to move the one tooth, the offending  tooth beat the aligner.

So more moulds were taken and 4 weeks down the line the first set of  what  Invisalign call ‘Refinements’ arrived.  I was confident that they would have addressed the problem with this new set.  After all you can’t expect them to get everything completely right first go, can you?

More filing down was done and off I went having mentally calculated the all important end date after another 18 aligners.

Another five   months down the line and there was the same problem.  There was no more space for the same tooth to move.

So back to the dentist  for more new moulds to be taken.  Negotiating  with the dentist on the simple need for more space to be created by more filing down resulted in blank stares and silence.

Which brings me to the next problem with  Invisalign.  Your dentist has no input into your treatment.  They just supply the aligners , put the attachments on when they are told to and do exactly the amount of fling down they are told to.  If Invisalign doesn’t say to do any more filing, your dentist will not be doing any, irrespective of obvious need.

Any attempt at discussing or reasoning is futile.  You are dealing with a computer in California which doesn’t respond to questions.  It is a one way street of communication.  Invisalign tells you what will be and you don’t question.  Unfortunately that is an approach that has never quite worked for me.

‘Refinement’ set number 2 inevitably failed for the same reason so here I am after 22 months with ‘Refinement’ set number 3 of aligners all because of one single tooth.  Another six months of 19 aligners which will make it 2 years and 4 months, a whole year more than I was original quoted.  And that is if they actually work this time.  Fourth time lucky?    Maybe, but  I’m not holding my breath.