When you come to the Healthy Smile Centre looking for braces in Erskineville, we will want to know about more than just your teeth. This is particularly true if you are after braces for your children’s teeth.

Here at the Healthy Smile Centre, we practice holistic dentistry, which means that we see oral health as part of a bigger system. The health of the teeth and mouth affect the rest of the body and vice versa.

So, if you come to us with issues around the alignment of the teeth and jaws, particularly in children, we will be wanting to look at what else is going on with the systems that connect with the mouth. For example, if the airways are not working properly, it can affect the development of the jaws and mouth, and also the face.

Getting to the root of the problem
We will want to make sure everything is okay before we go ahead and fit braces in Erskineville. Some dentists, when presented with a jaw of teeth that seem to be too crowded for the arch, will resolve the problem by extracting some of the teeth and then use braces to draw the teeth inwards into alignment. It may seem like a good idea, but in fact the human jawbone should be able to accommodate 16 teeth, and if there doesn’t seem to be room, it’s important to find out why and solve the cause of the problem, which is, why is the jaw too narrow to accommodate all the teeth, rather than the symptom, which is that the teeth are crowded.

Just removing teeth and then using braces to realign the remaining teeth creates a smaller bite and a flatter face. We would argue this way of resolving the issue actually creates facial damage, so we will look for other ways to resolve the problem of crowded teeth that do not involve removing teeth that are in the mouth for a good reason.

Once this problem is solved, we can move to using braces in Erskineville to resolve any alignment issues, giving you, or your child, a strong, broad, healthy jaw and the right number of teeth within it.