Teeth Straighteners

Every year 300,000 youngsters go through the painful and costly ordeal of having their crooked teeth clamped into braces to be straightened. Last week in New Orleans the men who make the braces, the Inter-American Orthodontic Congress, met to discuss new ways of clamping down on unruly young teeth.

It may be heredity, bad nutrition, lack of care or accident that is the reason many children's teeth gap widely or fail to connect when they close their jaws. This condition is called malocclusion; it is the orthodontists' favorite word and their chief problem.

Classic technique of oldtime tooth straightening was to bring the teeth into line by main force, with heavy plates or bands that pressured them gradually forward or back. The bands, tightened once or twice a week, stayed on for painful years. More recent methods use thin wires which are passed through light bands cemented to individual teeth, giving a gentler pressure.

Hopeful new development in orthodontics, from the patients' point of view, is a radical treatment of some forms of malocclusion worked out at Yale Medical School by Dr. Bert George Anderson. By building up a complicated engineering structure of small bands, spurs and wire in the mouth, Dr. Anderson brings both teeth and jaws into alignment. His rig makes talking and eating a little difficult, but he leaves it in place for only a short time. From two days' to two weeks' application, he claims, brings teeth into line as perfectly as uncomfortable months of the older methods.

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