I would not recommend Invisalign orthodontic treatment over regular braces for two reasons. The first is that my daughter went through having the treatment with the Invisalign aligners and the problem was that she rarely wore them.
After spending $5,000 and after her two years was up, her teeth look exactly like they did before she started treatment. Since they were uncomfortable to her and made it somewhat difficult to pronounce words because of the plastic material on the inside of her teeth; she just didn't wear them.
She was away at college during treatment and we didn't know if she was wearing them or not; but found she didn't because there was no improvement that we could tell. Had we had traditional braces put on her teeth, they would be straight now since of course she would have had no choice to wear them or not.
The second reason I would not recommend Invisalign is that you have to pay the orthodontist up front for the treatment vs. Traditional braces where you pay it out over the treatment term. Since we had to take out a loan for $5,000 and pay the orthodontist for the full amount up-front, he had his money and therefore had no incentive to give her the best treatment to keep her as a patient.
With traditional treatment, if the orthodontist is not giving you what you feel is quality patient care, you can switch to another orthodontist and start making payments to your new orthodontist. Since of course the first orthodontist does not want to loose your child as a patient, he has an incentive to give the child quality care and keep the parents happy.
Our orthodontist would overbook on us and my daughter would have to wait for long periods of time to see him. On one appointment, we went there and found he had gone on vacation for one week and we were not notified. Since he already had our $5,000, we couldn't switch to another orthodontist.
Had she had traditional braces on, we would have switched to another orthodontist in a flash. I think this particular orthodontist squeezed in his Invisalign patients whenever he could in between his patients who had traditional braces (and who were paying him monthly).
The orthodontist had really sold us on the Invisalign over traditional braces. Yeah I guess so since it cost about twice as much and required less work on his part during the office visits; no changing out the wires, just slip in the new piece of the Invisalign plastic.
So after spending $5,000 for orthodontic treatment and my daughter's teeth looking as they did before she started treatment, I am kicking myself for not having gone with traditional braces.
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