Welcome to the Friday Focus! My name is Dr. O from E&S Orthodontics. And I am going to be answering a question of what you should do when your bracket falls off during orthodontic treatment.
Obviously, we don’t want your bracket to fall off during treatment because it actually slows down treatment. But we want to give you the scenario.
It’s inevitably going to happen. And so what we want to do is kind of give you a little bit of a background on what you should try to do in the case that it does.
And so the first thing that you want to do is you want to contact the orthodontic office and let them know that one of your brackets has fallen off. And then the assistant or the person scheduling the appointments can determine whether the bracket needs to be put on immediately within the couple days of it falling off or it can wait until your next orthodontic appointment depending on when you’re scheduled out.
The second thing that can happen is if you do have a bracket that falls off, depending on where in the mouth it falls off, it could have different consequences. So a lot of times if your bracket falls off near back and the back of your mouth, that could lead to a pokey wire. And if you have a pokey wire, then that can actually cause some pain. And so that would be something that you would want to kind of immediately address.
Sometimes a bracket will fall off in the front or on the sides. And so those brackets can actually be delayed in terms of putting them back on. But it really depends on where you are in treatment.
So that’s really one of the most critical things that I want you to kind of get away from this video is you want to know like if you’re in the beginning part of your orthodontic treatment, it’s probably having a bracket come off is like a biggest concern to me as if you had a bracket come off near the end of treatment.
The reason is near the end of treatment, we’re usually trying to dial-in your bite and the final positions of the teeth. So having a bracket come off near the end of treatment is more critical because if a bracket comes off and we don’t get that repaired within 24 to 48 hours, then we can have a tooth shift in a way that would actually preclude you from getting possibly your braces off if you’re scheduled to have them off. And so it really depends on the timing of when that bracket does come off.
