What's going on with orthodontic arch expansion

Dental deformities need to be corrected in a timely manner. We know that dental health is very important to people. If the teeth are crooked, sometimes after examination, it may be due to insufficient dental arches. At this time, the dental arches can be expanded for treatment. Especially for children, timely orthodontic treatment is very important. Sometimes, if the teeth are seriously damaged, further treatment is needed.

What is the problem with orthodontic arch expansion?

It may be that your teeth are not straight and the doctor thinks that the dental arch is not large enough to accommodate the straightened teeth, so he recommends that you extract the teeth or expand the dental arch.

Dental arch expansion is to stimulate jaw bone development, not to turn the teeth outward. Think about it like a semicircle. If you make the circle bigger, the circumference will get bigger, and there will naturally be enough space for the teeth to be arranged.

Does orthodontics for children require tooth extraction?

In the orthodontic clinic, there are often parents who bring their children to the clinic and ask to have their children's buck teeth removed to shorten the treatment period and get a set of neat teeth as soon as possible without affecting their studies. There are also many people who question when the doctor recommends tooth extraction: Is tooth extraction good? Is it okay not to extract teeth?

Orthodontic treatment for children is generally performed in the early permanent dentition. Medically, crowded teeth and abnormal bite are all caused by the fact that the number of teeth is greater than the number of bones. The purpose of tooth extraction is to adjust the balance with bone mass by reducing the amount of teeth. However, children's development is basically completed until around the age of 20. During this period, the increase in bone mass plays a very important role in adjusting the balance between tooth mass and bone mass. Recently, many scholars have concluded that tooth extraction and orthodontic treatment can affect chewing efficiency, and as children continue to grow, the amount of upper and lower jaw bones increases, and the lower 1/3 of the face may become too concave, changing the good appearance after treatment. Professor Yukio Machida, an authority on pediatric dentistry in Japan, has reminded orthodontists through more than 30 years of clinical research that the irrationality of performing irreversible treatments such as tooth extraction too early is obvious.

Modern oral treatment emphasizes non-invasiveness and timeliness, and requires no short-term or long-term harm. To date, there is no reliable quantitative standard for judging appearance in cosmetic medicine. Orthodontic tooth extraction in children is mostly performed under the doctor's advice. Therefore, when it comes to the issue of whether to extract young permanent teeth during orthodontic treatment, the orthodontist is first required to have excellent medical skills and good medical ethics. From the perspective of dynamic development, he should consider multiple factors such as chewing, appearance and child psychology, and combine photography, radiography, model analysis, medical history inquiry, etc. to decide whether to extract teeth. In addition, after repeated discussions and comprehensive designs, the doctor recommends tooth extraction for orthodontic treatment. When the child and parents only request correction and are unwilling to have the tooth extracted, the child and parents who are reluctant to give up their teeth can cooperate with the doctor to perform measures such as arch expansion and pushing the molars backwards, and try their best to correct the tooth (occlusion) deformity to achieve the goal of improving appearance.