hey it's dr amanda with straight smile solutions straightsmilestations.com and today we're going to
talk about pop pliers or step bend pliers and the difference between that and repositioning
a bracket and hopefully you can watch my other videos on repositioning brackets
because i'm actually not at all a fan of these kind of pliers
nor do i use them nor have i really ever used them because i don't see the point of them
i think that you should do and i'm not going to go through the whole scenario because you just
watch my other video you should do repositions of brackets instead of bends if you do reposition
the brackets at the right time which is when you're still in the leveling and aligning stages
in your round wire at the beginning of treatment not at the end of treatment
you're gonna save yourself a lot of time probably about six months per case a lot of heartache and a
lot of money by going back and forth between wires so i don't do this anyways in ortho residency we
learn how to do bends we have to do some cases with bends it's part of what we learn but in
reality do i use them almost never and if i did i don't use a prop plier but in any case
learning how to do bends correctly takes a lot of time and it's really a waste of your
time if you're a general or pediatric dentist so personally i say do the bracket reposition
technique don't buy these pliers it's a waste of money if you do feel the need to buy these pliers
you're going to have to buy them in all kinds of different increment increments up and downs ins
and outs z bends i mean you're going to drop two grand on a set of pliers that you totally don't
need but anyways i'm going to show you how to use them anyways so if i did do ben's hypothetically
speaking this would be the one scenario um let's say i took a patient through my normal scenario
where we go to 18 nighttime and i always talk to the patient about their ups downs ins and outs
at that stage this is where they get control of their case i tell them hey we're in round wires
this is where we do the ups downs ins and outs i want you to have some say so how do you feel about
say how your laterals are relative to your centrals or how do you feel about the heights
of these teeth relative to one another this is the time where i want you to weigh in you
go show your friends show your family show your boyfriend you know whoever show them your front
teeth and if they have anything to say this is where i want to hear it because there is some art
to this and i want to know your feedback and this is the time when i want to know it not at the end
so you give them an opportunity and some doctors even have them sign off at that stage saying i'm
happy with the alignment of my teeth it doesn't mean you're happy with the bite you're happy
with the alignment of your teeth because your alignment should be done at that stage at the
18 round wire stage then you move on to your thicker wires i usually go up to about 18 25
night time i can start closing space that's when i bust out the power chain that's when i start using
my class 2 or class 3 elastics if i needed them if i needed box or triangles i did those back in the
round wire stage on you know lighter elastics but again back to my scenario let's say patients said
they were happy we got to the very end we were in our 18 or 19 25 night and then patients like
uh and maybe we had to close some space we had to use some elastic so if i went back to the round
wire this is going to be a nightmare because i'm going to have to re-bracket then i have to
go work my way back up to the stiffer wires and i have to go back to the power chain i'm going
to go back to the elastics it's going to take possibly at least another six to nine months or
i could do a steel wire and do some pop bends of course i do it just with my hands not a pocket
plier but that would be the very one-off scenario anyways pop bins come in different thicknesses oh
shoot i've never even used one of these pliers before but i'm assuming it's not that hard
i'm assuming you just hold it over the wire and you just squeeze it and it should this i
know this is a half millimeter one so let's see so that's exactly okay that didn't really do anything
supposed to work
okey dokey well this is supposed to cause a step up or a step down maybe this is an in and
out one maybe that's why i was having issues okay let's try that see these stupid pliers
oh yeah this is kind of weird this must be an in and out one
so you can see this is what happens when an orthodontist uses a step plier for the first time
yeah it kind of made a little step that's ugly and you can see like the way i look at it
at a wire after i do a step i want to make sure that it's balanced and this one is like distorted
so anyways i don't like pliers like this so that was my example of what not to do because i think
they stink but this is a step plier supposedly and it looks like to me like it's up and down one
but i don't use them anyways so all right so i showed you what not to do don't do that and
here's why because it's all distorted you can see how distorted this this wire is
now it should not look like this it should not be like off the ground like this but that's my
example hopefully that was helpful thanks do as do as i say and not as i do exactly thanks bye