Posts by Dr. Ryan McComb DMD

An Invisalign treatment plan doesn’t usually derail band practice. Parents ask about how wearing clear aligners impacts musical instruments almost as often as they ask about sports, usually right after their child picks up a recorder in third grade, a clarinet in sixth grade or makes the cut for marching band as a freshman. The…

Somewhere around month three of wearing Invisalign clear aligners, you gave up. Wearing the aligners 20 hours a day just didn’t fit your lifestyle. And the treatment didn’t result in the straight teeth you wanted. Well now, there’s a marketing pitch promising to let you have your cake and eat it too. Less than three…

Patients now come in asking me to leave things alone. For years the request ran the other way. Straighter, broader, flatter across the front. That was the assignment in Invisalign for adults, and the tools got very good at delivering it. So I open a consultation with a different question now. Not what would you…

Invisalign for a severe underbite can move teeth into a stable bite without the jaw surgery most patients are told they need. Some patients do need surgery, but not most. In my experience, roughly one in ten have an underbite so severe they need jaw surgery. What makes an underbite too severe for aligners is…

Invisalign for a severe overbite can pull protruding front teeth back into line. Jaw surgery is one accepted way to correct a severe overbite, and for many patients aligners are another. If your front teeth stick out far enough that people have called it an overbite, what you most likely have is an overjet, and…

If there is a gap between your upper and lower front teeth when you bite down, adult Invisalign treatment can close it. Orthodontists call that gap an open bite, and it is a fairly common condition treated in orthodontics. Most patients don’t actually call it an open bite. They say their front teeth don’t close,…

As an orthodontist who has treated thousands of Invisalign cases, I’ve seen trends come and go. Some are worthwhile. Others are clever marketing dressed up in clinical language (think Smile Direct Club). Nighttime aligners, and the way some companies are promoting them, fall firmly in the second category. Here’s why. The pitch for nighttime aligners…

You can see the best Los Angeles Invisalign orthodontist there is. But if you don’t wear your trays, your bite won’t change. Compliance is the number of hours per day you actually wear clear aligners. After ideal programming from your orthodontist, it is the single variable that decides whether a 14-month case finishes in 14…

Patients shopping for Invisalign usually visit two or three orthodontists before they commit. And most of them wind up making their decision based on price and how comfortable they feel in the office and the chair. Orthodontic consults typically involve an iTero scan, photos, a treatment timeline, and a price. So the differences between providers…

Adults tend to dismiss the signs you need Invisalign as harmless cosmetic flaws. In my experience, most of those flaws are symptoms of a tooth that is still moving. A tooth that has started to drift does not stop on its own. The overlap that looks minor this year grows a little deeper by the…