What are malocclusions?

When the dentist tells us to “bite together” they are checking our occlusion or how our teeth relate to each other when we close down.  In a perfect world our teeth would fit nicely together, none of them hitting each other too hard, none of them getting out of line by being too far to the front or too far to the back.  Malocclusions can also be the result of a bad habit like thumb sucking.  It can happen when we’re young and it just doesn’t get better on its own.  The way to fix this is to have the doctor see what type of relationship the top and bottom teeth have to one another. 

One real misconception is that crooked teeth are just a cosmetic issue.  Nothing could be farther from reality!  The more out of alignment the teeth are the more likely they are to cause major problems down the road.  If you are a person with a crooked tooth, like most of us, you could be in the toothbrushing olympics (if there was such a thing) and be a gold medalist and STILL you wouldn’t be able to properly clean a crooked tooth.  Help those teeth get in alignment!