Many times, our patients breeze through their treatment with one, two, or ZERO brackets that break! But on the other side of things, the times that it starts feeling like you’re calling to schedule an emergency appointment once or twice a month for your child, it can get frustrating. We agree, that this is not a normal situation, so we’re here to help our patients understand why this can be a more persistent problem with one child versus another.
Top 6 Reasons Braces Brackets Break
We’ve heard you and we understand the frustration this can bring; therefore, we’ve compiled a list of reasons and ways brackets can break!
- Eating “off-limit” foods and/or not properly cutting food into smaller bites, i.e.: whole apples, crunchy granola bars, skittles, jolly ranchers…we are always happy to review the list with our patients whenever it seems needed or asked about!
- Chewing on ice, pencils, or fingernails. Excess of this can put persistent pressure on the wire or brackets and result in breakage
- Getting a mouth injury. In some cases, playing sports or falling can end up breaking a bracket
- Brushing your teeth too hard can cause brackets to pop off your tooth.
- Using toothpicks can leverage brackets to break away from your teeth
- Rough flossing can also cause brackets to fail
Broken Brackets Go Unnoticed
“But they were eating soft bread! I was watching them when it happened.”- It can appear that a patient was eating the “right” foods when a bracket feels loose. Most of the time, though, that loose bracket has been off long before it was even noticed! When a bracket breaks off the tooth, it will still be attached to the wire (that’s the Damon System, baby!) and will slide back and forth. A lot of times this can be tough to notice right away. The result? It gets noticed when “I just woke up and it was loose” or “I was just sitting in class, and it started sliding!”.
How We Prevent Bracket Breakage
Hinsdale Ortho only utilizes top-of-the-line, high-quality products, and materials. Our viewpoint is that when WE use the best quality, this limits any risk for “faulty” workmanship on our end of things. This makes us confident there will be fewer bonding failures and room for an emergency.
The teeth are prepped, and isolated and brackets are glued on with 100% confidence of our doctor and assistants, so when our patients come in with a broken bracket, we evaluate the reasons it could have been broken. When the glue is still on the tooth- this shows us that the bonding did not fail but something of force caused the bracket to be broken off from the tooth. On the other end of this- if the tooth is free of any glue when a bracket is broken, this alerts to us that there was a larger chance of moisture/bond failure.
We will always evaluate the situation chairside and ask all the questions to help our patients understand why brackets break and work with them to limit emergency visits.
Broken Braces Bracket Repair in Hinsdale
Whether you’re a patient of ours, or from another office, and need help with defective brackets please contact our team. We pride ourselves on having a limited amount of emergency appointments in order to value both our patient’s time and our office’s time. With that being said, when there is an excess of broken brackets, we will evaluate and work on the best solution for both parties in order to manage treatment in the best way possible!