All That You Must Know About Minor Underbite Correction
When a person’s jaw is misaligned, it causes the lower teeth to protrude beyond the upper teeth and is called an underbite. While a protrusive bite or an overbite is a common dental condition, an underbite affects just a small majority. The severity of an underbite can range from mild or moderate to severe, with the extreme cases being the ones where one’s lower jaw extends out far beyond the upper jaw. Minor underbite correction can be done without surgical intervention.
Surviving with a mild underbite is not always an issue, but severe cases can pose problems, such as difficulty biting your food and general discomfort and pain in the jaw and mouth. It can also lead to excessive tooth wear.
Are you planning to undergo maxillofacial underbite jaw surgery or jaw surgery in India? Reach out to us at Richardsons Dental and Craniofacial Hospital. Whether it’s to learn about a facelift dentistry underbite cost or explore tooth extraction for an underbite, our team of experienced medical professionals can answer all your questions. Dr. Sunil Richardson will guide you through every step of the way for a successful minor underbite correction.
How to Fix An Underbite Without Surgery?
Surgery is not the only method to treat an underbite. While maxillofacial underbite jaw surgery is recommended in severe cases, this condition can be dealt with in other ways. Tooth extraction for an underbite, for instance, is a popular go-to method when an underbite’s state is somewhere between mild to moderate.
For comparatively milder cases, braces or clear aligners are often recommended to patients. An orthodontist first needs to evaluate the patient’s underbite to suggest treatment accordingly, and the more severe the underbite, the more stringent the treatment will be. This is why it’s imperative to choose a medical professional with many years of experience so you don’t fall into the traps of inaccurate diagnosis and ineffective treatments.
Besides braces and tooth extractions, expanders and headgear also serve as alternative treatment methods for minor underbite correction. An upper jaw expander is brought into the equation when someone has an upper jaw that is small in width. By fitting across the patient’s palate, the upper jaw expander slowly widens the jaw until the upper and lower teeth match entirely. In the case of a reverse-pull headgear, the upper jaw is pulled forward. This treatment is the most effective for kids below the age of 10.
Modern dentistry has advanced enough and more in the last couple of decades, giving birth to non-surgical and non-invasive methods to correct an underbite without having to operate on the patient. With bite correction, doctors do not have to grind down an individual’s healthy tooth structure. Instead, the procedure aids in improving the natural features of a person’s face.