Invisalign: the untold downsides
I've had crooked teeth for ages but I've avoided getting braces to fix them because braces are extremely inconvenient and I'm unwilling to deal with them. Last year, however, my dentist told me about something called Invisalign, which she claimed would not be inconvenient because I could just pop them out when I wanted to eat. This seemed like a great idea so, despite the $6400 price tag, I decided to give it a shot. She took moulds of my teeth and they used 3D modelling software to compute the movements my teeth would need to make, then sliced up the sequence of movements into 23 phases, each of which resulted in a different transparent plastic shell that I'll need to wear on my teeth for a fortnight. All well and good so far, until she told me that I could only have the shell out of my mouth for a maximum of 2 hours per day!
That is proving to be a major hassle because I can no longer just pop food into my mouth whenever I feel hungry, which is very frequently. Neither can I enjoy the luxuriously long meals to which I am accustomed. I feel like the treatment was misrepresented to me because neither the literature, nor the disclaimer, nor my dentist made it clear that I'd be limited to eating for a maximum of 2 hours per day. I'm trying to eat meals faster but I may have to revert the mostly-vegetarian diet I'm been cultivating for the past year just so I can stave off the hunger pangs more efficiently.
