Whilst you are unable to visit your dental practice, there is a lot you can do to help yourself until your next appointment. These fall under two headings, looking after your brace and maintaining excellent oral hygiene.
Looking after your brace
At the moment, it is not possible to visit your practice to resolve issues with your brace so it is important that you do everything you can to avoid needing to contact them in the first place. When removing aligners, retainers and other removable braces, it is important that you take care putting it in and removing it. Breakages often occur if care isn’t taken and too much force it used. This might weaken or fracture the plastic or wire. Make sure you follow all advice given and keep your brace or retainer in its case when not being worn.
Damage to the delicate wires can happen if you eat something too hard such as crusty bread and if this happens, it might be quite difficult to find a solution you can implement at home. Likewise, damage to one of the brackets can also happen if you eat anything too hard, sticky or chewy so best avoid these at the moment. Chewing nails or pencils is also a common way to break a brace and as we shouldn’t really be touching our face at the moment, best avoided too!
Oral Health
You would have received advice to continue to visit your regular dentist and hygienist during treatment and as this isn’t an option either, even more responsibility falls on you to look after your teeth. Take extra care when brushing your teeth as it is easy to dislodge a bracket or bend a wire if excessive force is used. Make sure you regularly brush your teeth including around the brackets, between the teeth and under the wires. An extra five minutes each time you brush your teeth should help you to keep your teeth in great condition until you can visit your dentist again. There are a number of great oral health videos on YouTube and I’ll be linking to some in other posts.
I hope you found this useful but remember you should follow all advice given by your orthodontist and do everything you can to look after your teeth and braces until they can see you again.
