Can I Brush My Teeth on the First Day of Braces?
When you decide to have braces over your teeth to straighten teeth and get rid of the challenges that didn’t allow you to brush your teeth or floss them correctly, you make an important decision because the treatment also helps achieve straighter teeth and a beautiful smile. Most importantly, the therapy enables you to eliminate infections like tooth decay and gum disease that affect you because your teeth are challenging to clean because of their malformed position.
Getting braces on your teeth requires a couple of visits to the provider before you can have the dental appliance over your teeth to start repositioning them. However, you will likely have the braces over your teeth for a couple of years or more, hanging on to the complexness of your situation. In addition, you can experience discomfort from the orthodontic appliance in your mouth that feels alien and irritates your cheeks and gums.
Whether you inquired with the dentist providing braces treatment near me about how you must manage the braces or not, the discomfort follows you, making it essential for you to collect all information on how to cope with the orthodontic appliance and go through the treatment without damaging it or your treatment.
How Painful Are Braces on Day One?
The first day of treatment likely becomes the most painful because an alien appliance over your teeth restricts you from having the foods you love and irritates your cheeks and gums throughout the day and night.
If you haven’t collected information from the braces provider, we suggest you read this article to gather the information you need to continue your treatment comfortably.
You will likely feel constant discomfort with the appliance over your teeth. However, the most significant challenge confronts you when you try to sleep at night on your sides or stomach when your cheeks press against the wires and brackets to cause pain in the mouth. Therefore making some changes to your sleeping positions becomes essential to ensure your mouth contact with the braces is minimized as best possible. In addition, you must try to provide your cheeks the time to relax without pushing them against the braces.
While you will likely not confront significant challenges when sleeping on your sides, you might notice bracket imprints on the insides of your cheeks when waking up in the morning. However, the soreness subsides quickly to leave you feeling normal.
Why Do Braces Hurt in the First Week?
Following the start of your treatment with braces, the appliance on your teeth exerts stress to divert your teeth into their appropriate places. The brackets on your teeth remain in place, but the wires and bands continue pressurizing your teeth to move into a new position.
The motion of your teeth from their prominent positions is discomforting during the first week because you are still getting accustomed to the appliance. As you progress through your treatment and get the wires adjusted every month, you might experience additional soreness during the week after the adjustment. The pain you feel is expected and might remain with you until you complete the treatment. However, the discomfort is a minor inconvenience because it allows you to have straighter teeth without dental infections affecting them and a beautiful smile.
Brushing Your Teeth Soon after Getting Braces on the First Day
You might think you don’t need to brush your teeth on the first day after getting braces because of the irritation and soreness you feel. However, you must ensure that you don’t neglect to brush and floss because any discomfort you experience is temporary. In addition, you can help yourself find relief from the pain using saltwater rinses or over-the-counter pain relievers.
You might think brushing braces is a more significant challenge than brushing crooked teeth because obstacles are present on all teeth with wires running through them. However, the provider will recommend brushing after every meal and snack besides brushing in the morning and just before bed. You must also develop the habit of looking at your teeth in the mirror after every meal to physically detect particles sitting in the brackets to ensure you remove them with special tools available specifically for this task. Allowing food particles to remain on the brackets or your teeth encourages the formation of dental plaque, putting you at risk of tooth decay and gum disease with the braces over your teeth. Therefore the task of brushing and flossing gains additional importance when you get braces over your teeth, requiring you to invest in unique tools for cleaning your teeth from day one of getting braces to straighten your teeth.
uSmile Orthodontics provides orthodontic treatments to many patients and recommends the recipients brush and floss their teeth from day one of starting orthodontic treatment. If you need your teeth straightened, we suggest you contact this practice for therapy and start your treatment with explicit instructions on maintaining your teeth with this appliance.