More and more teens are making homemade braces to correct blemishes. A practice that worries professionals.
“A dream smile in a few weeks”, “teeth well aligned thanks to a homemade technique”, “perfect dentition without dentist fees” … such are the promises made by some amateur videos shared on the Web, and who alerted to French Federation of Orthdontics.
She is worried about this fashion phenomenon which mainly affects adolescents. These young people are said to be more and more numerous to draw inspiration from tutorials published on Youtube to make their own denture device themselves in order to straighten their teeth.
Non-trivial risks
The most common practice would be to put a small rubber band around the spread teeth, to tighten them. However, as the French Federation of Orthodontics explains, people who follow this advice expose themselves to very significant risks.
In particular, they can get a gum infection, and their teeth can be moved in the wrong direction. Worse, the elastic can penetrate the gum, which then no longer retains the teeth which can therefore fall.
Budget … and fashion
So far, most of the problems have mainly been observed in the United States and Asia. In these two regions of the world, orthodontic treatments can be very expensive without good health insurance. Several of the teenagers behind the tutorials that proliferate on the Web have understood this well. They put forward this financial argument to encourage Internet users to imitate them.
But France is no longer spared. Recently, a 12-year-old boy was rushed to thePitié-Salpêtrière hospital, after losing two teeth that he was trying to bring together. Following this case, the French Federation of Orthodontics decided to communicate.
In a country like France, where mutual insurance companies and CMU provide easier access to health care, young people are rather giving in to a fad by imitating other adolescents of their age. A trend that parents and health professionals must therefore learn to identify and prevent, before it spreads more widely in France.
Even though some tutorials, with supporting evidence, promise impressive results at low cost, the health consequences can be disastrous.