The Problem with Crooked Teeth

The body is an amazingly clever and well-designed system. For most lucky people our adult teeth come down in the right place and things look and feel pretty good. However there can be various issues that cause teeth not to be straight.

For example, you could have any combination of the following:

• The teeth don’t come down in the regular sequence.
• They come down not in the intended position.
• They don’t come down at all, i.e. are stuck inside your jaw.
• The person is born with extra teeth or too few teeth (this is more common than you might imagine)
• You lose one or more teeth for some reason. The adjacent teeth then move or tip into the gap.
• There are issues with the relative size of the jaws. Ideally they need to be in a good relationship with each other (just like you want both your legs to be pretty much the same length). This factor together with your tongue, cheeks, lips and facial muscles all affect the way the teeth arrange themselves.
• Interesting habits e.g. thumb sucking.

The immediate effect of having crooked teeth can be on how you breathe, eat, speak, kiss and smile. In particular; musicians, singers, actors and broadcasters can be very sensitive to any changes in the mouth. Athletes need a great airway to facilitate their sport.

There can be knock on effects in terms of your dental health, particularly if your bite is thrown out. This can impact how stable your teeth and jaw joints are over your lifetime.