hey it's dr amanda dr amanda with straightsmilesolutions.com and today
we're talking about single arch treatment i get these questions
all the time is it okay to do single arch treatment and the answer is it depends so
i think just because you're telling a certain treatment plan system like an invisalign or a
clearcorrect that you want to do it doesn't mean it's predictable okay or that you're
actually going to get a stable outcome so you can tell them to do it and they'll do it but
you're probably not gonna get what you're asking for and you might get a whole bunch
more than you bargained for and you might have to fix it so if you start single arch you have to fix
the single arch if things go wrong and for the most part i find the treatment planning software
for the major companies are all companies very unpredictable in single art situations so i try
to avoid it as much as possible patients come in thinking that they're going to save money
and actually they end up most likely turning out worse unless you pick the right kind of situation
and there's no easy formula for this so you really want to run it by an orthodontist just
to make sure you know what you're talking about um to make things easy i would never ever if i had to
make rules never ever do single arch treatment unless it only involves the absolute front teeth
ideally seven through 10 23 through 26 maybe maybe i'd include the canines but that's borderline okay
so that means we're not moving back teeth at all now let's take a step back let's say we've got
crowning okay how do we fix crowding right there's three different ways we can get arch expansion
proclination or ipr right or extraction actually there's four different ways well obviously
you're probably not going to do extraction in single arch treatment so let's take that one out
so we basically can't do arch expansion if we're doing single arch treatment right
because your arches won't be coordinated that's not possible so that's off the table
you probably can't do proclination in single large treatment because that kind of goes
with arch expansion you'll have some really weird shaped arch form if you do that and
it's going to look funky and it's not going to fit together so that's out so that leaves you only ipr
now if it's a spacing case you might be okay depending on how the vitas let's say for
example you have a tiny bit of overjet and you have a little diastema between eight and nine
that's probably okay if you don't have an over jet you have a perfect bite and you have a diameter
between 89 that's not okay because what's going to happen this happens quite often you're going
to get to an edge to edge bite because you have to retract the lowers in order to attract the uppers
see what i mean so so i'm saying it's not it makes it much more complicated it makes it much more
limited and how you can get things it makes things often go off track it often messes up the bite you
get up with a posterior open bite you can end up with back teeth not touching not integrating
and then what do you do now you gotta go back and do the bottom as well another patient's mad
and usually when you do single arch treatment it's because the patient's being cheap and they want to
save money um and it ends up that you're gonna end up having to finish this case and probably be out
of pocket for the additional trays treatment time etc and the patient's gonna be mad at you because
you said it was possible and it wasn't so again i want to let you know that often when you put
single art treatment requests into a treatment planning software like invisalign clear correct
or anything else it's going to let you do it but i find the outcomes extraordinarily unpredictable
and i've gotten pretty good at getting an idea if it's going to work out but my brain is a
much better software than their software so my suggestion is just just say no just say no the
answer is no no no no no no unless you know what you're doing the answer is always no that's my
suggestion for you because you're going to open up a whole can of worms that you're not predict
ready for and it's also i would say if there's top 10 complaints from patients of things that general
dentists do wrong when they do ortho that's definitely on the top ten things will most likely
go wrong and unless you picked wisely and you know how to handle it you're gonna end up way over your
head so anyways single arch treatment is probably oh no hopefully that was helpful thank you