What is an Inman Aligner?

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• published: 06 Sep 2015
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http://www.drtimmerman.com/cosmetic-procedures/inman-aligners/ Inman Aligners. Now in my practice, we have three types of orthodontic options for you, you can do Invisalign, a little more comprehensive, different goals involved; six month braces, it's using tooth colored brackets and wires, focusing more on the anterior six teeth, or front teeth; and we also offer Inman Aligners. It's another removable appliance that is similar to Invisalign because it's removable, but different because we're using completely different physics involved. Now the question then becomes, what if you could straighten your teeth in a matter of weeks as opposed to a matter of months, and that's kind of what we're trying to do with Inman Aligners. Now we are also limiting our goals and expectations. We're not trying to go perfect. We're not trying to fix necessarily your bite, although the bite can be affected and often improved. Sometimes to create room or space, we need to expand the arches a little bit, and the Inman Aligners can allow us to do that. The average case, typically is anywhere between six and twenty weeks. That does require some effort on your part to make sure you do your thing. Teeth in general takes ten hours of continuous pressure to get the teeth actually to start to move, and so if you only wore it for 11 hours a day, it's not going to work very quickly. We recommend about 20 hours, 20 to 22 hours a day of wear, take it out while you eat and while you brush your teeth, and that's it. So I have had some patients not wear it as recommended, for whatever reason they decided they just wanted to do it about 15 hours a day, really had very limited results, a little bit of frustration. So if you follow directions, and you are dedicated to wearing a removable appliance, then you can consider an Inman Aligner. Not all cases are appropriate for Inman Aligners, but more cases than maybe you might think would work very well with an Inman Aligner. We charge per arch, but it is something that quite often we're doing just a single upper arch with the Inman Aligner. What we're trying to do is, it looks like a retainer that has a bow on the front of the teeth and a bow or an arch on the inside part of the teeth that has springs attached to them. So the front part is kind of pulling the teeth inwards, and the inside part is pushing the teeth outwards. So when it's in place, what we're trying to do is with slow gentle forces, we're able to get the teeth to move into place. Now the outer bow is going to have recessed areas where the teeth should fit into, and as the teeth are pushed into that area they can also rotate. Now the rotation correction is going to be limited to a certain degree, it can rotate, but if you have significantly rotated teeth, you probably aren't going to be able to use Inman Aligners. Early on, the aligners may only be putting pressure on a single tooth. Eventually as that tooth moves into position, the other teeth are touched or affected, and then can be pushed into or tipped and rotated into place. Inman Aligners are convenient. They allow you to eat whatever you want. You're going to be able to brush and floss like regular, because there's nothing on your teeth at the time. Sometimes we do have to bond a little bit of, some composite material on the teeth just to help make sure that the aligners are placed correctly, but for the most part there's very little if anything placed on the teeth at all. It's an alternative to brackets and wires. Things that the Inman Aligners can work for are crowded upper and lower teeth, protruding front teeth, gaps between the teeth, uneven teeth, misalignment, and also complete smile makeovers. Quite often what we're trying to do, we do what's called pre-prosthetic alignment. People come in, they want porcelain veneers, but if we veneer their teeth with the alignment that the currently have, we have to be fairly aggressive. Sometimes really to do things the way that they want restoratively would require maybe some root canals or even extracting teeth and doing bridges. Whereas if we can do pre-prosthetic orthodontics, move the teeth before we veneer them, then we can be very conservative in the amount of tooth structure that's required or maybe even not have to remove any tooth structure at all and just place porcelain over the teeth to give us the proper color, the proper dimensions, the shape and the size of the teeth. And if we straighten them first, then we can do that all very conservatively.