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1) Currently on invisign - mould 24 of 42
2) For 5k (Cdn) - I get 42 moulds, a method used to scan and submit my progress for each mould duration, feedback and advice from a dentist, a scan test to see who they fit
3) Considering the cost of braces and the flexibility these allow (as long as you are disciplined in wearing them) it's well worth it
4) My teeth were really misaligned. At 42 I just decided to do it so I could smile more in pics. Not confidence issue, just sometimes in life you have to do things for yourself
5) You can see the 3d printing lines and its pretty detailed given how lightweight and accurate the shape is for each tooth
6) There are little mounts they install on your teeth for the moulds to latch on to as well, so its not just a fit on the teeth but the mounts as well
7) Each individual mould has a unique number on the package in comes in as well as on the mould. Each package has my name, the dentist and the mould number out of 42.
8) I could see changes starting with mould 6
9) If look even close to mould 42, I will be extactic
10) it also comes with an attachment for your phone that alows you to submit self exams each mould. Its really cool. its very impressive
Just be prepared near the end for refinements. When I did mine, I had to do another 6 months of refinements near the end to help get the locking of my bite grip to be where it needs to be. I was otherwise expecting that day to be when I’d be done, and later learned refinements are a fairly common occurrence when going through Invisalign.
As the sibling comment, it’s definitely worth it. Best of luck!
This isn’t the case with 3D printed bracket systems. Studies have shown that the 3D personalized bracket system from LightForce will cut down treatment time over 40%. The refinement phase is also spot on and finishes much faster, and recent studies have shown further improvements. Also, the more complex the case, the larger the delta on the performance. Not all orthos are practicing this way but this is where the future is going whether it is LightForce or another company. The physics just works out better than the best plastics.
Disclaimer: I’m a health nerd and was an employee a couple years ago.
Best of luck! I completed mine 2 years ago and have to say it was 100% worth the patience.
My SO is now using it. I’m waiting for her impressions to decide if I want to do so.
The dentist told me I’d only need it for like 3-4 months, minor corrections. But it seems like such a hassle. Always having to remove it before eating anywhere, no coffee, and gotta make sure I’d always travel with the next set of aligners etc.
Glad it worked well for you though!
I've had good smile all my life but now at 41 I've started to feel a tightness between my teeth.
Lo and behold I read that as we age the jaws shrink which makes the teeth crowd together.
I'm going for a free mouth scan in a couple weeks.
Wouldn't be such a big deal if we didn't keep all our teeth, but we do now. The migration forward as we age, plus wisdom teeth are evolutionary holdovers.
Fun fact, I have one fully grown in wisdom tooth. The rest are still there, but never moved. My dentist is always after me to get all of them removed, telling me that they won't fill a cavity on the grown in one
And conversely having all of your teeth, and straight ones at that, help prevent jaw wasting.
How long does the process last? Are the moulds monthly or something like that?
I haven't done any similar treatment and I'm considering it at 35. Worried about the length since I heard it takes far longer for adults.
Do you know what type of plastic they use? I have a 3D printer and I wouldn't want to put 3D printed stuff on my mouth. It's way too easy to end up with microplastics
I went through these and am pretty happy with the results. Mostly to counter the crowding of the teeth that happens naturally as you age.
As you probably know you're going to have to wear retainers at night for the rest of your life if you want your teeth to stay where they landed.
I had really bad teeth as a kid, so had braces. Periodically I'd have to go in to get them tightened, and remember the worst whole head pain for a day. Just curious is switching Invisalign molds is a similar process?
Tangential, but I have sleep apnea. Fortunately I have it mild enough to get away with a mouthpiece instead of a CPAP (which is good anyway because I also have bruxism).
The mouthpiece works great and I would recommend everyone get tested for sleep apnea if your insurance covers it, but I have to admit that paying for it bothered me. Even with insurance covering some of it, it cost me about $600.
I know that there's a deceptively high amount of engineering required for these kinds of things, but it was very hard to wrap my head around paying $600 for what amounted to a couple pieces of clear plastic. I actually got them to send me the STL of the scan of my teeth, and some back of napkin math indicated that it would have cost me about fifteen cents of resin to print it out myself. Instead I'm paying about 4000x that price.
Obviously this is not apples to apples, I'm sure they're using different and/or better resin that what I have, and as I said there's probably engineering and fine-tuning for this, but even still it was not fun to pay for.
All the same, I sleep like 10x better, so I suppose that considering that $600 is a cheap price to pay.
I think your comment would have been more insightful if you had at least pretended to try to account for labor before saying "They charged me 4000x the cost of goods!".
To be clear I'm not even asking for you to account for the cost of your printer, the 3d scanner, and software licenses in your math. Let's assume that all those are free. How many hours of specialized human time was spent on consultations, scans, design, reviews, to produce working guards for you?
The next question is then, of course, how much do they charge for subsequent guards now that the scan has been done and validated? Is it still 4000x the cost of raw resin?
With sleep apnea, I highly recommend you look into myofunctional therapy, which is like airway physical therapy. (full disclosure, my mom is a myofunctional therapist). It worked for several friends; They still use their cpap but they get much better sleep after committing to a routine. Not advertising but spreading the word, find someone local!
I have a MAD I got online as well and the experience is a bit subpar, lots of parts broke (the bands) and I can’t easily get replacements parts. My MAD also broke, and I can’t replace it easily (they sent me a new one but it doesn’t fit). They also are not testing me to see if there’s any difference (I think it works because I wake up less, and definitely wake up less to pee). Figuring out what band to use is also a esoteric process. It’s amazing that this exists besides a CPAP but we are really beta testers at this point. Oh and I learned later that they don’t replace your retainers
>Even with insurance covering some of it, it cost me about $600.
Well that's pretty close to how much the entire CPAP system would cost depending on the sale.
I’ve tried custom molded mouthpieces for grinding but couldn’t adjust to sleep with them. I notice them and feel the discomfort of it not feeling natural despite it being a pricey professionally manufactured piece. It just feels too artificial. I also wonder about the long term effects of polymers in the mouth for long periods of time daily.
fwiw, if your sleep apnea is when you're on your back, consider somnopose/torena and put your phone is a running vest like https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D24X29WQ
life changing for me
> I know that there's a deceptively high amount of engineering required for these kinds of things
I think there's a deceptively low amount of engineering required for most medical and medical-adjacent tech. The high costs are rooted in pervasive industry-wide centuries-long FUD campaigns.
> All the same, I sleep like 10x better, so I suppose that considering that $600 is a cheap price to pay.
First time?
Price is not determined by cost to produce.
It’s determined by the price a customer is willing to pay.
So shouldn't this really be something that could be opened sourced. I think I've seen a few write ups of people that did their own, but seems like a highly functional implementation could be democratized.
It is definitely not that simple for a number of reasons.
Yes, aligners and retainers in theory may be printed on some commercially available hardware. At your own risk, because you will be printing a medical device and you will need:
1. A treatment plan: simulated movement of teeth at every step, taking into account all forces. That’s specialized software or external lab service.
2. Precision. You put too much pressure at the wrong angle and you will need a surgery to fix the damage, because the tooth root moved in wrong direction.
3. Plastic. You cannot use ordinary 3D printer ink. You need a plastic that can survive the chemical environment in your mouth, maintain the pressure, and you probably want it to look good (no discoloration etc).
4. Finish: Align Tech, Straumann etc do not stop after 3D printing, there are few other steps involved to make sure there’s no sharp edges etc.
5. Maybe you will need attachments (to focus pressure in the right direction on certain teeth) or wires.
Align Tech is Apple of clear aligners, but now competition exists, producing aligners at scale is commercially more efficient, considering all the risks and required qualifications, and of course the best materials for aligners are patented and not sold OTC to everyone.
Disclosure: I worked at Align 10 years ago and later was CTO of European DTC competitor.
I did Invisalign a few years ago. Manufacturing the retainers is surely only a small part of the puzzle.
They used a specialized sort of 3D camera on a stick to get an incredibly accurate model of my mouth, any open source solution would need an equivalent. And you’d also need open source code from somewhere to work out which teeth need to move where and at what stage in the treatment.
Orthodontics is simply “making a retainer” the same way orthopedics is simply “putting screws in a leg”.
The difficult part is not the manufacturing, but knowing how to do it properly so you don’t harm the patient.
Certainly it's not impossible to DIY, but it's more difficult than just popping some aligners on your 3d printer.
Manufacturing them requires a resin printer and a vacuforming setup, but that's still the easy part. It's a whole system with a dental 3D scanner, software for rearranging your mouth, and attachment points that have to be epoxied onto (and later removed from) your teeth by a dentist.
A point I didn’t see sibling comments make is that the dentist often has to file between teeth for them to sit and align correctly. They did so several times in my case. I would not want to do that to myself!
It’s been tried, with some success. Pretty sure I’ve seen a post here on HN from someone that DIy’d it end to end.
But it’s also something that’s not responsible to shortcut. Shifting teeth around too fast can result in permanent root damage and even loss of teeth. There was a whole cottage industry in the US for a while focused on under cutting Invisalign with a reverse-engineered product, but they often moved on accelerated treatment timelines that caused a not-insignificant amount of harm to patients, and cut corners on intake (DIY at home mold kits) that also contributed to problems. Pretty sure all of the companies doing this are basically dead now.
Need expensive printers and you need CAD software that can correctly move the teeth. Also not all it can be done by software, sometimes you need to blank out certain teeth that dentist will make the call.
My 2 kids had those and it is amazing compared to traditional way, pulling healthy teeth, wearing braces which are brutal to your teeth.
It should be illegal to pull kids teeth when this tech exists. Dentists were angry about this but it is superior in every way. I think costs will come down, but they are already cheaper then alternatives.
I am happy my wife researched and discovered Invisalign.
One required much more alignment, I don't remember but it was 20+ weeks, other was done in 16 weeks. Now they have retainers and that is it.
I don’t like this interviewer’s tone, at all. It was like… confrontational but in a teenage way.
Nobody tells you how much it hurts, but it’s worth it (just in the increase in dental hygiene alone in my case).
For some reason now it’s assumed these were some kind of injection molding, but it makes perfect sense that it’s 3-D printed.
Didnt hurt much for me
He does have a German wikipedia page
Yours was already a dupe, why comment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47411658
There’s a dental procedure in Latin America that is cheaper but only a few places in the US do it.
It’s called - C5 Hidden Orthodontics, not sure why I was downvoted
Most teeth align themselves as kids age.
This is almost never necessary.
Yes, the 12 billion dollar company must be doing something that no one needs.
Depends on diet.
If you keep them on soft food young, the jaw muscles don't get stimulated enough to grow so that the teeth that are coming out sit properly. Misalignment and opportunity for decay ensues.
If you give them decently hard food early on in life you solve most problems.
After that it can still happen but there's less chance.
"almost never" for 8 billion people is "hundreds of millions of people need this".
E.g. I do
There are folks working on solutions for when teeth do not align themselves.
Until wisdom teeth come in later on and cause crowding or visual issues
Ok, sure, it's usually cosmetic. So what?