hey it's dr amanda with straight smile solutions street smile solutions.com and today we're gonna
be talking more about self-ligating brackets woohoo so this i like this type of dot because
it has one quadrant of self-ligating and one quadrant of like clear guys like clarity's
with uh traditional ties so let me go ahead and keep in mind that whenever you buy a self
lighting gating bracket you know it's got a little trapdoor that has to be opened and shut
sometimes you need a key like a special key from the vendor sometimes you can do it with
a scalar or explorer this special one you can do with an explorer but not a scalar
so you can basically see here that there's like a little hole and you're just gonna lift
put the little explorer in the hole open up the trapdoor okay
keep in mind i am looking through the hole of my camera to do this so it's a little trickier
than in real life okay and these things can bend and break just letting you know okay they do and
when they do they're expensive so keep that in mind and by doing that that i didn't untie all
these it should release it so that these can come out it's still in the buckle tube but i should
be able to lift it right out see oops i didn't do that one well enough there we go see we did it and
if i want to get the whole thing off obviously i'm going to have to take the rubber tie off this one
and all these other ones so let's talk about the difference between self ligating and rubber ties
so the brackets themselves i've done a lot of videos on this so this is going to be a super high
level the brackets themselves are significantly more expensive self legating because it's a pretty
like intricate contraption whereas regular brackets just have like a slot and you just put
a rubber tie on right the nice thing about these especially if you have crooked teeth is that i can
put a pretty heavy wire in like it's much heavier than i normally could with a tie bracket because
that little rubbery thing can't really keep it in the slot right because it stretches out
whereas this little thing when i want to close it see how i just close it with my with my nail
it's very easy to close with your nail you just close it down oops that wasn't in the slot that's
why it didn't close okay so you just put the wire in the slot and you just close it down that's it
okay so that's all you do these are probably three four five times more expensive per bracket so
instead of a couple dollars we may be looking at eight to ten dollars per bracket for the dentist
to buy and obviously it's less if you buy it in bulk um there's more name brand ones like demon
and some of these other ones and then there's you know obviously it's been around for over 20 years
so there's generic models too they work just fine obviously some have cheaper trap doors they tend
to break or bend once they break or bend you're screwed you gotta take the bracket off and fix it
so um but the nice thing about these is that you can put a kind of heavier wire in normally i'm
going to start my cases with 14 or 16 nitai but with this i could definitely start with 18 night
time go ahead close that trap door down just hold it really securely into place before i close the
trap door down boom close it you know and it's going to grab on and with regular rubber ties
for example i want to show you this is all stretched out can you see this this is not the
size it was when we put it on because because it's been on this type of that for a little while it's
all stretched out these things need to be changed every eight weeks at least you know some dentists
will do 10 weeks but that's a little questionable when i put this in i could let the patient go for
16 or 20 weeks four or five months with a nice 18 night tie assuming i put the brackets on perfectly
especially if you did indirect bonding and buy you know the only thing that's going to happen is
if the patient you know had a lot of crowding obviously you're taking up less space um
you know as we start to straighten them and stuff like that so it's going to you know the
wire could should shift or something like that could happen you might have to trim wires but
you're not going to really have to do anything you could really let the patient go obviously
i wouldn't abandon my patient for four months i'd probably have them check in virtually you
know maybe every eight weeks or something like that just to make sure everything looks good
make sure the alignment's going well no broken brackets or anything like that but it really
does save a ton of patient time a ton of chair time even though you're paying more for those
brackets right but that's the benefit but it doesn't make sense to me to do this because most
kids are choosing kids are choosing braces instead of aligners not usually for price anymore because
most orthodontists are charging the same price for a biz as for braces or at least if they're
not they should be but they're often choosing the braces because they want colors they don't want a
trapdoor it doesn't make any sense to you know do this and then put colors over it that just defeats
the purpose it's going to provide more friction so that's the benefit is this goes quicker right
especially in a crowding patient in a spacing patient it makes zero sense to me because you're
gonna have to put power chain on anyways which is elastomeric so that makes no sense you might
use the cheaper brackets but anyways remember you have to make sure you don't sometimes you
have a special key you have to purchase most of the ones i've used you can open with either a
scalar or explorer you need to know the difference um but otherwise just a price thing and just uh
just a different way that the appointments are so unless you need to change a wire you really don't
need to come in just virtually have your doctor check that's pretty much it alright thanks so much