What if a brace breaks or falls off?

No! And not your braces either!

Sometimes braces do come off of the teeth. They can get knocked off by eating the wrong foods, by fingers or other items (forks, pencils) poking at them, or if the glue wasn’t connected strongly enough.

Patients some times say “I didn’t realize the brace was broken – I thought it was just loose.” Well, if it’s not connected to the tooth and is wiggling on the wire – that’s broken!

First thing to know: the brace coming off isn’t an emergency. If the area is bothersome, place some wax or gishy goo on the area so that it is comfortable. Give us a call and we’ll get you in as soon as we can to fix it up. If you can save the brace or if it is on the wire, we can clean it off and reuse it. But if you lose it, it’s no problem – we’ve got plenty more!

If the brace comes off in a way that it’s very bothersome, wax isn’t helping, and we’re not in the office, there will always be an emergency number on the answering machine to reach one of us after hours or on the weekend.

Hopefully we have very few of those broken braces during treatment! But we’re prepared to fix them if need be.