hey it's dr amanda with straight smile solutions street smash solutions.com and today we're going
to talk about finishing cases with various little appliances both custom and semi-custom
we're going to talk about two different companies one of them is tp
the other one is healthy start you can see i'm using a ton of acronyms here that is
purposefully because one of these companies is very litigious and not very nice to me
for no reason um and i really really even hating hate making content to give them business because
that's really not my goal but some of the stuff they make is actually pretty good and useful so
i am making this video upon request of one doctor that reached out to me and asked this question
begrudgingly i'm making this video let's put it that way but it actually is a good video okay so
let's talk about tp versus hs what their menu of services are and how you can use them um to
help your cases so let's start first with the og company that is tp tp is a company that is based
in i believe south bend indiana it's been around since the 40s it is a family based company that
means it was owned by one family member who passed it down to their next family member and they tend
to employ a lot of family members um very nice people um i have met them i spent goodness was
it 2018 or 2019 aao hanging out in their booth i was helping them with some lectures and stuff
so it was pretty cool um that is that so they have two major products one of them is a custom
i call it custom mini positioner the other one is a pre-finisher so you can see here in this photo
this is the pre-finisher so let's take you down a little bit of orthodontic history so unless you're
over age 55 or 60 you may not be or unless you're an orthodontist you probably aren't familiar with
their products because you probably wouldn't have used them but i've known about their products for
decades so way way back when when you did braces on a patient in the 60s 70s or even early 80s i
can tell you my husband was one of these patients because he's a lot older than me and he had braces
i think in the late 70s actually when he had braces way back when there was no ability to
glue braces onto a teeth so braces were attached to a metal band which you put spacers in between
every teeth not even just molars but premolars and incisors and they were custom banged down
hammered down onto the tooth and that's what moved the tooth so when you finish the treatment and you
remove those bands from every single tooth so you can see here in this picture these are glued right
imagine no glue imagine just a circular band that went around even the front teeth right so
that's why they call them a trade track mounts they're really uncomfortable really painful and
really ugly slowly as the technology evolved they were able to at least on the front teeth
get glued on braces and the back teeth had the bands i can tell you when i had braces in 1991
um i had bands on all my premolars and molars but my front 16th top and bottom had braces so
i was kind of in the middle but basically when you finished a case a braces case you had itty bitty
microspaces in between every single teeth front and back and that's not good right because it's
a flat track it's a food trap it's a perio trap so you had to close those spaces you couldn't just go
straight into retainers easily so a lot of times they would make a rubbery appliance and look like
a football mouth guard that the patient would wear for a few months that would help to close
the spaces and that's what a positioner is so tp has two major products one is like i said
is a pre-finisher pre-finisher is semi-custom meaning that they have 30 40 50 different sizes
that you can stock there's common sizes and you can actually measure with a little ruler and i
don't even know if i think they can do it even with a scan and they can tell you which size
would fit the patient best price point i think and don't quote me on this is around 90 100 ish
i think less if you buy the kit less if you buy in bulk and basically at d-bond take the braces
off or take the invisalign away give them one of these suckers that fits them they wear this about
14 to 16 hours a day they try to chew around on it during the day they don't have to wear it at work
they don't have to wear it in school and that could either become their full-time retainer
which is nothing wrong with that it's going to help an airway having a one-unit retainer
or later you can swap it out for some essex winch all everything settles
you get all the irregularities the bite is better and everything like that so pretty cool
the other option if you've got like strange anatomy or if you want it like perfect perfect
is the semi custom which is actually made the way they made it in the old fashioned days where it's
actually articulated it's on a mount it's custom made for that patient if you can if you are a
dentist you probably remember this in um prost lab you know when you did dentures you would
mount the case and you would wax up the teeth and and everything like that it's like that you know
they're gonna try to wax it up to your perfect occlusion perfect by perfect tripod contacts
and everything like that and that's what they're doing and then they're gonna make this silicone
rubbery mold that goes around the teeth they can do it different colors all kind of fun bling and
it is actually made for your teeth now my son had one of those um instead of a liners and boom
he never needed a liners or braces so it's just so minor what he needed after we fixed his bite
then we made him a tp custom mini so price point on the custom mini is unlike the pre-finisher
which is semi-custom like i said you can buy off the shelf in a variety different sizes
and it fits most patients 80 to 90 percent get a good result with that but um the custom mini
is about 300 ish maybe a little bit more um and it will take a month or two this is just based on
my report i believe tp says it takes three weeks but doctors are telling me it takes a month or two
to actually get but everyone really likes it when you get one of those and again this could be your
final retainer if you wanted to or you could just wear it so things are perfect and making essex
over that but anyways that's tp um the original so basically just to give you more if you're kind of
geeking out on the history of dentistry um i can tell you that invisalign modeled their product
and of course all the others elementary companies after them off tp's product you know that we use
in the 40s 50s 60s and orthodontists when they are trying to do a board case now board
is optional i mean obviously you don't have to do your nerdy boards to be an orthodontist
um a lot of people do it just because they like to be cool i don't think it's cool i think it's
stupid but in any sorry it's egotistical but um everyone i know who's done it is has an ego but
that's just me um i'd like to go against the grain i know i can finish the case great i don't need to
brag about it in order to do it but um if you want to take your actual hands on board in st louis
um pretty much everybody they're all cheating anyways they're all buying these custom minis to
finish their cases that's how we did them you know in residency and everything so boom this has been
it's a cheat basically it's been around forever but um yeah that's that's the cool thing about tp
like i said cool company nice family-owned company based in indiana okay always support local right
all right whereas we have another company which i'm not as fond as not that their products are bad
or anything like that it's just that we have a little beef going back and forth about
five years old i'm not going to go into that because like i said they're highly litigious
and for whatever reason they hate me so but they really shouldn't because i probably given them
close to a million dollars worth of business over the years because i actually think their
products are good and it's really unfortunate that they act like that but you know sometimes people
have behavioral issues so um another family-owned company sometimes family-owned companies are good
sometimes they're bad i'm just gonna leave it like that but um anyways this is orthotane healthystart
and i'm purposely using acronyms here right so i actually really like a lot of their products and
i have a lot of videos and they're all positive on their products um you know they do require
you to take a class to be certified that's their choice okay so whereas tp you can just go ahead
and order anyone can order you don't have to take a class how they start you have to take
a class it's a couple thousand dollars someone's their promos i used to teach the classes so i'm
very familiar with the classes right um you will learn something from the classes uh you probably
if you watch my videos you'll learn the same stuff but i mean it's just airway and and you know my
functional stuff and and you know telling position and growth and modification and things like that
but you know if you don't know this stuff it's a good idea um and then you have the ability to
prescribe their appliances which i actually think some of their appliances are very innovative and
they only they're quite patented so no one else has them i mean there's some copycats but i'll
be honest they're not as good so um the one thing i really like that they make is they have their
habit correctors so that's the hcs um which come in toddler sizes kid sizes adult sizes and they're
really barna and that's these suckers here they're really good at getting rid of habits you know
i mean obviously if you can afford an omt and or a myofunctional therapist no need this right
but omgs are expensive trust me i'm going through omt therapy right now
could i have worn a habit corrector uh probably not because i needed to stretch my freedom and
i needed a frenioplasty and stuff like that so i really did actually need the omt but if it's just
like a habit and a kid it's easy to retrain with an hc as long as they're actually wearing it every
night for a couple years right i mean the thing about healthy start is that their products are
a marathon not a sprint you're not going to do it in one month two months it's going to take years
and years and years to get rid of habits and to retrain and you know and sometimes you have to
pair it with expanders in my opinion and other stuff to make it perfect but it is definitely a
start um hcs are somewhere in the neighborhood of hundred-ish so pretty similar to the cost of the
pre-finisher like i said they're semi-custom they come in a couple different sizes um they also have
a some other products that are very similar to the pre-finishers in that they're also semi-custom
they have nothing custom so nothing is custom unlike tp they only have everything semi-custom
which is nice um they have their n's and their g's and their ig's so n's are their adult version
of the pre-finisher very similar material feels a little bit different but very similar okay um
which one do i think is better i mean on adults i don't really care it's all about the same on kids
you they tp is not meant for kids they don't have kids products i mean yes you can take their their
um pre-finishers and you can modify them to wear them for kids i have definitely done that before
um there are ways to do that um but if you're already a healthy start certified i'd say just buy
their juice because their g's are really really really really good i had both my kids and g's
and their great appliances and my fact they are my favorite appliance and if i ever went back to
practicing full-time i would probably be giving g's too if i could order them separate and not in
the whole treatment plan which is kind of my other beef with them and that some doctors are able
to order things a la apart some doctors have to order the whole treatment plan i get the point but
sometimes we like to use things the way we like to use them and that's part of being a doctor and we
don't want the whole series like i want to do say invisalign first with m a and then i might want
to go into a g for retention until i'm ready for phase two but they make you buy the whole series
which is upwards six to eight hundred dollars with the treatment plan i don't need a treatment plan
i'm orthodontist please don't have one of your doctors who's less qualified to me tell me how
to do things right come on man i'm not paying for that so um you know definitely has some issues
with certain type of things and i i think i would promote them a heck of a lot more if they got rid
of that but um in any case now you know but yes they do have appliances to help you finish cases
this is what it's coming down to but i think it's a lot better for younger kids than for adults but
it's there you know and if you want to get better occlusion and things like that you can definitely
consider using their ends or their g appliances but i think their habit correctors are great so
anyways as always with any video if one of these two companies doesn't like could i post it which i
think is kind of stupid because hey i'm allowed to have my own opinion and everything i say is true
but um i always can take it down you don't have to send me a letter from your attorney
requiring me to take your stuff down because hey then i really won't talk about your products
anymore and you're gonna lose out so um and i won't recommend them to my doctors but in
any case all right i'm gonna leave this up as a test and see how long it stays up take care