Author: Aura Dental
Braces can be a transformative experience
With 48% of people in the UK being unhappy with their teeth, it´s no wonder that many of us are opting for treatments to improve the visual aspects of our teeth. New treatments have made having braces in adult life much more appealing.
Here in St John´s Wood, braces are now available that have much less impact on your normal lifestyle. Teeth straightening appliances that can be removed make undergoing treatment less of a hassle.
At Aura Dental, we provide a range of treatments to fill your needs and fit your lifestyle. We believe that when straightening your teeth, you shouldn´t have to deal with dietary restrictions or worry about how your teeth will look during treatment.
Options for braces in St John´s Wood
Here at Aura Dental we try to provide options to suit you. Depending on the amount of adjustment you need, there are different types of treatment available.
A very popular option for more minor adjustments, over a shorter period of time is Six Month Smiles. This treatment uses clear braces to re-align your teeth using gentle pressure. This treatment is usually complete in on average 6 months. It is so quick because it only focuses on the front teeth – those that are most on display when you smile.
Another treatment that is very popular is Invisalign treatment. This treatment involves wearing a series of custom moulded clear plastic trays. The trays are different in shape from one to the other and you change them every 2 weeks, thereby adjusting your teeth with gentle pressure. A big advantage of this treatment is that they are almost completely invisible and removable.
Straighter teeth for better dental health
There are many benefits of having braces in St John´s Wood. Put simply, when your teeth are straight and aligned, they are easier to keep clean. With fewer places for harmful bacteria to take hold, your chances of developing gum disease and tooth decay are reduced.
We believe your teeth should feel good and look good, giving you the confidence you so rightly deserve. So come in to see us and find out how braces can help.
Dental implants in St John’s Wood: does age matter?
Due to advances in modern medicine, there is an ever increasing demographic trend towards a larger number of older patients who wish to replace their missing teeth with dental implants. Many of these patients are missing teeth for various reasons – old age, gum disease and trauma are the most frequent.
Conventional replacement of missing teeth, such as crowns and bridges offer short-term benefits and are not preferred by many of these patients.
At Aura Dental in St John’s Wood, dental implants are our treatment of choice for patients who have lost one, several or all of their natural teeth. Unlike conventional bridges and dentures, dental implants are permanently attached to the jawbone and create a stable foundation for replacement teeth. Age as a factor in implant success has been a concern among many patients.
Older patients, theoretically, have potentially longer healing times, more health issues to consider, and the likelihood of poorer jawbone quality. Nevertheless, a number of studies conducted on dental implant patients indicate that the procedure is safe and effective for adults of any age.
Health issues to consider
Age is not a determinant factor for dental implants; however, health is. As with any other medical procedure, implant surgery works better for patients who are in generally good health. Generally, if you are healthy enough for an oral tooth extraction or oral surgery in general, you are a good candidate for dental implants in St John’s Wood.
However, patients suffering from certain health conditions such as diabetes and heart disease may experience longer healing times. For this reason, it is always advised to let your dentist know of your condition in advance.
Another factor to consider when contemplating dental implants is jawbone health. Your jawbone must be healthy and strong enough to support your dental implants properly. If you experience jawbone loss, you can still have dental implants, with or without a bone graft. In any case, your dentist will ensure the best chance of long-term success of your dental implants.
Invisalign in St John’s Wood: invisible braces for visible smiles
Invisalign is an innovative teeth-straightening solution not only because it effectively straightens teeth, but also because it allows you to continue smiling while undergoing treatment. Invisalign is ideal for self-conscious teenagers and adults who wish to have their teeth aligned without having to wear unsightly metal braces. The best part is, that since Invisalign braces are nearly invisible, everyone else will see your natural smile and you will be able to continue your everyday activities with no disruption.
At Aura Dental, we are happy to offer Invisalign in St John’s Wood, in order to accommodate our patients who wish to have their teeth straightened without anybody knowing. Besides being discreet, effective and easy to maintain, Invisalign is also comfortable to wear and can be taken out when you wish to eat or brush your teeth. Our experienced dentists will guide you through the specifics and help you change your smile with this simply yet effective teeth straightening treatment.
What is Invisalign?
Treatment with Invisalign consists of a series of aligners that you progress through, using a new one about every 7-10 days. These aligners are made of transparent, high quality plastic and are customised to fit comfortably over your teeth. Each aligner is individually manufactured with the help of 3D technology with exact calculation to gradually shift your teeth into their correct alignment. Treatment time is different for each patient, however, it rarely exceeds 18 months.
Unique benefits of Invisalign invisible braces
Besides being virtually invisible, Invisalign has many benefits that fit the lifestyle of a teenager or an adult. Since Invisalign aligners are made of smooth plastic, they are less likely to cause harm in the soft tissues of your mouth or poke your tongue. Moreover, it is easy for patients undergoing treatment to continue their favourite activities. Finally, since the aligners can be taken out to brush and floss, you can keep on top of your oral hygiene routine and you needn’t worry about food sticking in your aligner.
Get in touch
Invisalign in St John’s Wood is the best way to transform your smile without interfering with your day-to-day life. To find out more about this innovative treatment or contact our friendly team to arrange your FREE consultation.
Dental implants in St John’s Wood: a permanent solution for your missing teeth
Tooth loss can be devastating for many people, not only because it affects the appearance of their smile, but also because it can cause many oral health problems. If you don’t replace the missing teeth, the gaps can cause other teeth to move, may create jaw problems and in the long run can even lead to further tooth loss. They also leave unattractive spaces in the smile and the more teeth you lose, the more problems you will have with eating and speaking.
Luckily, dental implants offer a permanent solution to tooth loss. From replacing single teeth with implant-supported crowns to same-day teeth, dental implant solutions help you overcome tooth loss and restore your oral health and function to the fullest. At Aura Dental, we encourage our patients to replace their missing teeth with dental implants in St John’s Wood, since that will save them from compounded oral health costs down the road.
What are dental implants?
Dental implants are artificial tooth roots made of titanium. They are surgically inserted into the upper or lower jawbone, where they are left to bond with the bone over a period of time. This process is possible due to the titanium being compatible with human body tissue. After the healing period has passed, your dentist will attach replacement teeth such as crowns, bridges or dentures over the dental implants.
In some cases, your dentist may be able to complete the entire procedure from root to replacement teeth in just one visit. The teeth attached to dental implants are very natural looking and fully restore your smile and oral function. Dental implants are very durable and will last for many years (potentially a lifetime) with good care and regular visits to the dentist. On occasion, they may need to be re-tightened due to normal wear but this is a quick and painless procedure.
Dental implants in St John’s Wood
Invisalign in St John’s Wood: a nearly invisible solution for straighter teeth
Invisalign is a relatively new cosmetic dentistry treatment that helps patients straighten their teeth quickly and, above all, discreetly. Invisalign is ideal for patients who wish to correct the alignment of their teeth, but prefer to avoid braces due to aesthetic considerations.
At Aura Dental, we think of Invisalign in St John’s Wood as invisible braces. One of its biggest advantages, is that you can straighten your teeth without anyone knowing that you are undergoing treatment. The clear, removable aligners are custom-made to fit your mouth and, unlike braces, you can easily remove them before eating and drinking. In that respect, Invisalign not only eliminates the problem of getting food stuck in between your braces, but also helps you to manage your oral hygiene with regular brushing and flossing.
How does it work?
Invisalign has a unique approach to straightening teeth by using an ‘invisible’ system so you do not need to have metal brackets fixed to your teeth. Instead, Invisalign uses a series of clear aligners that gradually straighten your teeth over a specific period of time.
With Invisalign, each tooth is corrected by the Invisalign aligners, which fit comfortably over the teeth. The procedure is based on the teeth conforming to the teeth straightening template designed and made for each patient and based on their teeth 3D scan. Your dentist will provide you with a set of aligners and you will have to change them every two weeks until your teeth have reached their correct position.
Patients with Invisalign do not need to visit the dentist often for adjustments. However, they have to attend a periodical assessment once every two to three months. Our dentists will, during the assessment, evaluate the progress of your teeth straightening and ensure that the progress is in accordance with the treatment plan.
Eligibility and treatment
Invisalign in St John’s Wood can treat various conditions such as overcrowded and widely spaced teeth as well as crossbites, overbites and underbites. However, Invisalign is not suitable for everyone. Contact our dental practice today and book a consultation appointment with one of our dentists, who will assess your eligibility and create a customised treatment plan.
Fully functioning false teeth
If you have lost some teeth, or are on the way to losing some, you will know how important teeth actually are. Sure, they look nice, but they are also very important for chewing and therefore ingesting the right nutrients we need to be healthy.
The trouble with traditional false teeth in the form of full or partial dentures, or fixed bridges, is that they do not give us back our full chewing power. Indeed, when people start to wear dentures, they get a long list of foods that are now beyond their chewing capabilities. Dentures only have about a quarter of the chewing power of real teeth. This is one reason why dental implants in St John’s Wood are proving so popular. Food is increasingly being discovered to be as important as medicine for good health, and, unless you want to live on smoothies and soups for the rest of your life, being able to chew is vital to maintaining nutrient levels and therefore health.
How do dental implants work?
In St John’s Wood, dental implants at Aura Dental are giving people back the full functionality of their teeth. They do so because they replace the root of the tooth as well as the crown. Once stabilised in the jaw through a process called osseointegration, the dental implant can withstand multi directional chewing forces of up to 220lb or 97kg. This is more than the chewing force of the average adult male.
Having dental implants holding the crowns securely in place also means that biting is easy again. Denture wearers are advised to cut up their food before they eat it because there’s a good chance they might leave their teeth in whatever they are biting into.
At Aura Dental in St John’s Wood, dental implants are used to replace single teeth, several teeth in a row, or even all your teeth. Each implant can support up to 3 teeth on a bridge. When they are used to replace all the teeth, between 4 and 6 implants are strategically placed within the upper and lower jawbone to support a set of dentures.
What do we do in dental implant surgery
If you are thinking about having dental implants in St John’s Wood to restore your missing teeth, you probably want to know something about the procedure of fitting the implants.
The beauty of dental implants in St John’s Wood with Aura Dental is that the actual implant procedure is fairly straightforward. It only takes about an hour for our implant surgeon, George Angelidakis, to make an incision through the gum and drill a hole wide enough to insert an implant. The dentist first drills a narrow hole with a small drill bit. As the drilling takes place, the area is bathed in a stream of water to keep the bone cool under the friction of the drill. Once the narrow hole is drilled, it then has to be widened a couple of times, with larger drill bits, to make a channel wide enough to accept the implant.
Once the implant is in place, George puts a temporary cap over it to protect the internal screw, and then replaces the gum.
This is implant surgery at its most simple. However sometimes there is more work to be done, as shall see below.
More complicated scenarios
Many people need to have failing teeth extracted before they can receive dental implants in St John’s Wood. The extraction and the implant insertion can usually be done at the same time.
However, things can get a bit more complicated if you also need to have some work done to make your jawbone stronger. This is often the case if you have been without some teeth for a while, or if you have been a smoker. When you have no teeth in your jawbone, the area of bone around where they used to be is no longer stimulated by teeth clinking together or by chewing. With no stimulation, the jawbone does not renew its cells. In fact, it actively resorbs itself and releases the calcium from the bone back into the bloodstream.
You need a good, strong jawbone to support the forces of chewing with implants, so if your jawbone has lost size and density, you may need to have a bone graft before you have implants fitted.
Ingenious teeth straightening
What we’d all really like is to be able to get our teeth straightened without any braces at all marring the fronts of our pearly whites. While that is not yet possible, you can get braces in St John’s Wood that are so discreet that people would have to peer very closely at you to spot them.
These braces in St John’s Wood don’t work on the traditional systems of wires strung between angled brackets to pull teeth into position. Instead, they spring from the digital age, and rely on aligners that look like very well-fitting mouth guards that push the teeth into position. These are Invisalign aligners – the 21st century’s answer to tooth alignment.
How does it work?
Invisalign works entirely differently from normal braces in St John’s Wood. Instead of just one appliance that is fixed to your teeth and periodically adjusted by your dentist, Invisalign gives each patient a series of 3D printed rigid, transparent plastic aligners, which are so thin that once they are snapped on over the teeth, they can’t be seen.
The first aligner is very slightly different from the current position of your misaligned teeth. When you put it on, you will feel a pressure. This pressure is what moves your teeth. Each aligner will move each tooth a tiny little bit, and it will take about 2 weeks to do so. Once the pressure wears off, it’s time to pop in the next aligner and wear that one until the pressure disappears again.
The aligners are 3D printed for each patient, from detailed, precise measurements from digital scans done by us here at Aura Dental. We also use that information to show you a computer simulation of how Invisalign will move your teeth into alignment. You get to see your finished smile before you begin treatment with us.
We send all that information off to the Invisalign lab in the USA, where the aligners are printed. You need only come back to us for check-ups every 4 to 6 weeks, saving a lot of time in a year-long process.
Invisalign aligners are also removable for eating and drinking and cleaning, which is so much easier than fixed braces.
Straighter teeth make for happier people
Smiling is vital for our mental wellbeing. A genuine smile, known as a Duchenne smile, when your eye muscles contract as well as your mouth muscles, kicks off the production of serotonin in the body. Serotonin is one of the body’s feel-good chemicals. It goes into special receptors, like a key into a lock, and then we feel great. And then guess what happens? We smile more! We smile at people, they smile back, and soon the world is a happier place.
At Aura Dental, we know the value of a good smile and it’s not measured in money, it’s measured in feeling good and seeing how feeling good smooths people’s paths through life. It’s one of the things that we love about the work we do with braces in St John’s Wood.
A worthwhile investment
Braces can make a huge different to people’s willingness to smile. Some of our patients come to us and tell us they are so ashamed of their crowded, crooked, or gappy teeth that they have been suppressing their smiles for years. Trouble is, when you do that, people tend to assume you are miserable and unfriendly, and they instinctively feel reluctant to spend time with you. Not smiling can lead to loneliness and isolation, which leads to more not smiling, so it goes around.
But with braces in St John’s Wood, all that can change in a few months to a year or so, depending on your particular misalignment issues. If you were suffering from serious bite issues, these would have been fixed with National Health Service braces in St John’s Wood. There are plenty of milder cases for which NHS funding is not available. We can treat these cases too.
Your options
Invisalign aligners, also known as invisible braces, are clear plastic mouth guard-like trays that are 3D printed from digital scans. You get a series of them, somewhere between 12–48, and wear each one for about 2 weeks. In that time, specially designed misfits in the plastic pressure your teeth to move, and each aligner is a step toward alignment.
Why not come in and see how braces in St John’s Wood can help you smile more?
Now you see them, now no one else does
Let’s face it, braces aren’t really a good look. You may not mind wearing them if you are a teenager and you can brighten them up with colourful brackets and wires; but you’ve never seen braces in Vogue or GQ as the latest must-have stylish accessory.
Things is, crooked, crowded, or gappy teeth don’t make it into the fashion pages either. Models and celebrities always have perfect rows of pearly white teeth these days. So, what’s a person to do? Unstylish if you don’t, unstylish at least for a good few months, if you do.
There is a solution
However, stylish people in the know do get their teeth straightened with braces in St John’s Wood. It’s just that they do it with discreet or even invisible appliances, such as Invisalign. Invisalign are quite different from traditional braces, which are usually variations on the theme of brackets and wires that often, but not always, are fixed to the teeth for the duration of the treatment.
In St John’s Wood, braces in the form of Invisalign clear aligners are pretty much invisible once you put them on. Invisalign is a system of very thin clear plastic aligners that resemble mouth guards. They are 3D printed using detailed measurements from digital scans of your mouth. Each aligner is a tiny incremental step different from the one before. The pressure from the slight incremental changes push the teeth gradually into alignment over about a year, depending on the complexity of each case.
Over 4 million people have been treated with Invisalign braces. In St John’s Wood, they are also incredibly popular. One reason is because they become as good as invisible when they are in place. Another reason is because Invisalign clear aligners are removable. Although they must be worn for at least 22 hours a day in order to complete the treatment on schedule, they are taken out for eating and cleaning. This means that you can continue to eat whatever you like, whereas the range of diet can be limited when wearing fixed bracket and wire braces.
To find out more, come into Aura Dental for a free consultation.