Smile Direct is a company that is establishing locations in malls. And theyre having somebody, not a doctor, just the employee taking an iTero scan without a doctor present. And theyre fabricating aligners without really checking for cavities, bone loss, positions of the teeth in most cases. And when youre dealing with the teeth, youre dealing with a live object. And a lot of times, what we have to do when we do Invisalign, we have to polish the sides of the teeth to get them to fit. Or we have to keep them in the bone that is available. And if you push them out of the bone, then you have an unstable situation. Its not going to last too long. Matter of fact, it might be where youre going to have that person possibly lose some of their teeth.
The orthodontist really is the captain of the ship. And it has to be where you know where youre doing and where youre going, or else, its not going to work. Unfortunately, with the internet, theyll have a patient either go to their location or send materials to your home. And you dont know who the doctor is, and hes not around. And theyll go ahead and send all the aligners out to you and you are not totally supervised.
The aligner is in the packets, and they may have you change it every 10 to 14 days. But theyll just send it to you in the mail. You never get to see the doctor. And theres so much that can go wrong, that thats why you should be going to the orthodontist. And if its not tracking, thats where if its not following the design that was set--and see, when we do the Invisalign, we also do what we call attachments. And attachments basically allow us to grab the tooth and orient it a little bit more, like a bracket on a tooth. Attachments basically are bracketing the that we glue onto the tooth and remove when we finish.