Remove Your Own Orthodontic Work
If you had orthodontic work unwillingly placed in your mouth, and it is as simple as braces and an upper expander, you can easily remove it yourself with a little patience and time.
Contents
Steps
- Make sure to brush and floss your teeth. It will be easier to both see or feel what you are doing and will make the cleanup a little less messy.
- Reach into your mouth. make sure that you can see AND feel where the brackets are.
- Take your pair of pliers, and place them so that the pliers and your braces make a ninety-degree angle.
- Close the tips of the pliers over the bracket.
- Use a firm but gentle upward clipping motion. You should feel a pop, and if you did this correctly, the bracket and a small bed of the glue will be detached from your teeth.
- Repeat all the way around. Do not attempt to remove the bands yourself. These are held in with a very strong cement that only a dentist can remove.
- Go ahead and tug the wire out from the bands. It will be sharp, so be careful. Hold the ends of the wire so that you can keep all the brackets on. If you drop the wire, it will be quite a mess, so hold on tight!
- Repeat for the bottom. The expander, if you have one, comes next, and depending upon what you have, you may want to skip this. The expanders tend to be banded (see above for removal of bands)
- If your expander is the type where the screw is in the roof of your mouth and there are two very sharp wires that embed behind your canine teeth, use the key that you were given. Release the turns back to the original or a little smaller.
- Place the tip of your tongue behind the back of the expander. this step is uncomfortable, but keep thrusting your tongue in there, while simultaneously wiggling the bands with your fingers, or the pliers. This part takes a while. If it hurts, stop, rest and then try again. Be careful, these are the same types of motions that a dentist will use to extract teeth. The orthodontic band remover braces the removal of the bands against the tooth to prevent the undesirable force vectors.
- Brush your teeth several times, at least two or three, and use mouthwash once all the work is removed.
Tips
- Take some ibuprofen or another similar anti-inflammatory such as aspirin before you start. It will make the pain a little more bearable.
- Use something akin to an aircraft maintenance tool, or a jeweler's set of tools. They are small enough to work with orthodontic work.
Warnings
- Be careful when popping off the brackets. You don't want to chip your teeth.
- Discuss with your parents before doing this.
- Teenagers: Do not do this without your parents knowing. They will be quite upset. Braces are expensive and if you take them off you just wasted about $5000 your parents paid to get you braces. Just convince them to not get braces in the first place. It's much better than having to waste a year of your life in constant pain and not being able to eat your favorite foods.
- If your issue is mild pain, ask for pain medicine.
- If your expander is a different type, or if you do not have a good awareness of where all the parts are, do not attempt this.
- Attempting to remove the bottom bands yourself can result in broken or damaged teeth. Please do not attempt to do these yourself. Let the dentist do it.
- The prongs are extremely sharp, be careful.
- You will bleed for a little bit, especially if the expander has been in a long time. It should stop fairly soon, but if you have a bleeding disorder, do not do this without supervision.
