hey it's dr amanda with straight smile solutions straightsmilesolutions.com and today we're going
to talk a little bit more about midlines and i have a few other midline videos if you want to
watch them um specifically more about how to get your midlines on in a braces case or an
invisalign case we're not going to talk about that right now we're just going to talk about
the difference between facial mid lines and dental midline so if you want to watch those other videos
you're going to want to go into my youtube channel which is street smile solutions youtube channel
not your youtube homepage in general you go into the search bar at the top of your youtube page
put in straight smile solutions and it'll bring up my channel then once you're in my channel you go
to that little tiny magnifying glass top right not corner but just top right about a quarter
of the way down the page towards the right and you put in midlines and from there you'll see
all my videos on midlines and how to get them specifically today we're going to talk about
dental versus facial midlines and when i work with my clients my general and pediatric dentist and my
prosthodontist and even my orthodontist who work with me in my consulting practice straight smile
solutions um often this comes up where they're struggling about the midlines and i like to always
clarify which midline are you talking about are you talking about the dental midline aka
for example this or this or are you talking about the facial midline which is the midline with the
face two different things okay and sometimes we can't have it all in orthodontics we just can't
and remember not all patients are symmetric i'm certainly not symmetric i can tell you i'm not
my nose is a little deviated one side of my face is a little asymmetric you guys can look at
the videos it's very obvious to me sorry we're not all born totally symmetrical and even so if we're
not all born symmetrical and even you know that's just the way we were made then we're not going to
be symmetric with the midlines that's just how it is so ultimately that's the first thing i'm not
even going to blow something up that's not a big deal because 99.99 of the time the patient has no
idea what a facial midline is they may know what a dental midline is but they're probably not even
going to notice if the midline is slightly off with the face and i don't even think you should
even stress about it unless it was part of the chief complaint if it was part of the chief
complaint you may or may not even be able to get that on because if they have some asymmetry
there's nothing you can do so don't stress about it don't make a mountain at a molehill
it's probably not a big deal let's try to get the bite looking good fitting together well let's
try to get that dental midline on the best we can you know the way it's meant to go remember moving
teeth is like a puzzle and if we don't have complete symmetry either in the shape and the
size of the teeth or the face it's not all gonna fit together perfectly that's okay that's why we
have restorative that's why we have ipr and other things like that so for example you can see here
in this picture this patient's dental midlines are pretty much coincident with our facial mid lines
i drew a line from in between her eyes going down to the tip of her nose her philtrum and
down to her chin point it's all pretty much lined up lucky for her so is this patient
this patient is not okay this would be the facial midline this would be the dental midline it isn't
coincident sorry that's just how it is maybe he has an interference and maybe he's slick
sliding or pivoting over okay so i just wanted to create some awareness just so when you're
using the word midline of conversation you're clarifying i'm assuming most of the time when
people say the word midline they mean dental midline and not facial midline
but sometimes it doesn't happen so anyways just wanted to clarify that all right thanks so much
and you know what if it looks like it's going to be way off and it is part of the chief complaint
you want to make sure you're not taking this case this case needs to go to an orthodontist because
it may need surgery okay sometimes you can't just do these things with invisalign or braces
alone sometimes involves a jaw surgery so it may not be possible to give your patient everything
so if you have one of those hyper obsessive patients that's asking for the world and you're
a little confused do not take that patient send it to an orthodontist all right thanks so much