Correcting a SmileDirectClub Case Means Starting Treatment Over From Scratch

SmileDirectClub corrective care starts with the same assumption every time: whatever a patient’s aligners were doing gets discarded, and treatment begins again from a fresh scan. SmileDirectClub shut down its global operations in December 2023, leaving patients mid-treatment with no provider to finish the case.

Our practice has treated more than 50 SmileDirectClub corrective cases in the past one to two years. Two presentations show up most often: a posterior open bite, where the back teeth no longer meet, and trays that never fit well enough to move teeth the way they were supposed to.

Old SmileDirectClub Trays Never Get Reused

We have no idea what the programming is, it was done remotely by who knows who. We would never use a tray we don’t know the movements of.

Every SmileDirectClub corrective case starts with a new iTero digital scan, not the at-home putty impressions SmileDirectClub used to build its original trays. The first half hour of a corrective consultation looks close to a standard consultation. We look at their teeth as if they’re not in treatment and haven’t had treatment. We take teeth from where they are now to where we want them.

Manually programming a new plan means the case gets the same overcorrection, attachment placement, and bite planning as any other Invisalign case built from scratch. None of that was available under SmileDirectClub’s model in the first place.

SmileDirectClub’s Model Never Addressed the Bite

SmileDirectClub trays were not scalloped to the gumline the way Invisalign trays are, which is part of why they fit more bulkily and less comfortably. More significantly, the SmileDirectClub model had no way to use attachments, rubber bands, or interproximal reduction, the tools an orthodontist needs to correct how the teeth bite together, not just how straight they look.

That gap is why a posterior open bite is the most common finding in a SmileDirectClub corrective consultation. Straightening alone was always on the table; correcting the bite never was.

A Corrective Case Often Takes As Long As Starting Fresh

It’s often no different than if a patient had come to us originally. A patient SmileDirectClub treated for six months, who would have been a 12-month case starting from scratch, is often still a 12-month case from that point forward, sometimes longer, because the bite side effect has to be corrected on top of the original goal.

It’s always harder to correct side effects than to control them in the first place.

Corrective treatment at the practice typically runs $4,000 to $5,500, often more than the original treatment would have cost, since a corrective case has more to fix than a standard one. Patients who present a SmileDirectClub receipt receive a $500 courtesy discount toward that cost.

Not Every Patient Needs a New Course of Treatment

Some SmileDirectClub patients finish close enough to their goal that no further movement is needed. For those patients, we fit Vivera retainers to hold the result in place rather than starting a new treatment plan. The same applies to patients arriving from Byte, another direct-to-consumer aligner brand that has since closed.

SmileDirectClub was the most common direct-to-consumer brand we’ve seen walk through the door. Candid, another at-home aligner company, has since rebranded as Olive and repositioned itself as an orthodontist-led model. Every corrective consultation gets evaluated on its own merits regardless of which company treated the case first.

The Corrective Evaluation Runs In Person or Remotely

An in-person evaluation runs about an hour: full photos, a digital scan, and one panoramic X-ray, followed by a discussion of what a new plan would involve. Patients who cannot come in can send photos and any records they still have by email instead, and our team builds a preliminary plan from those before ever meeting the patient.

A patient can start that evaluation getting started with Invisalign the same way any new patient would, in person or with photos and records sent in for a remote review. What changes for a corrective case is the starting point, not the process.