bluram

Some get them on day one ... and some never have them.

If you're wondering about this for yourself, talk to your ortho, as this is the person who will have a treatment plan for you.

The elastic bands don't align the jaw ... as in the bone, they align the teeth in the arch so that they come together better.

Good luck!

I have been wearing bands for 7 months now, using them to align my bite. fabulous little things!

ok..because I've been reading everywhere that they do align your jaw and my ortho even said he used them on an adult patient who had a severe underbite and he got is teeth and jaw almost to or back to normal

To move bone you need to have surgery bluram ... unless it's some jaw work done before it fuses, which is usually around adolescence, although for some it may be a year or two later ... but not long. Also this type of work could not correct a skeletal class II or III ... no matter what age the patient was.

With dental class II and III's, many ortho's are great at getting the teeth to move and the result is that the bite is corrected. My bite was a dental class III ... where the upper teeth closed behind the lowers. My uppers are now in a class I bite ... the correct bite ... with my uppers slightly in front of my lowers. This has been achieved solely with elastics moving my teeth ... my upper and lower jaws are still exactly the same, but my teeth are very different.

If the problem is skeletal, elastics can not fix the bite. They can mask part of the problem and make things look a lot better, but the stability of a bite corrected this way is not good. Some patients are happy to have a 'masked' bite rather than surgery, which is fine as long as they make a well informed decision.

That really clears things up for me now thanks.