Over recent months, you may have seen more advertising from direct to patient orthodontic providers promoting their clear aligner treatments. Some market themselves predominantly via social media advertising and some have city centre stores where you can seek advice and start the process with a digital scan. The key similarity between each provider is that they claim to offer lower cost treatment by eliminating the need to see a dentist or orthodontist. Where treatment needs to be prescribed by a dental professional, this is done remotely with the clinician not seeing the patient.
There is much debate about the risks to the patient with this approach and Kevin O’Brien has written an interesting post summing up some of the concerns about these services particularly around the legality of this model of delivery of orthodontic treatment.
I recently visited one of the direct to patient stores in London and will be writing about my experience in a future post.
You can read Kevin’s post here