Welcome to this blog post on the use of Aligner Chewies when you wear Invisalign. 

What’s the point of aligner chewies? Many Invisalign patients bite on their aligners when they first put them in to help them fully seat. That’s very common thing to do when moving to a new set of aligners to help them seat really nicely and strongly on the teeth. 

Here’s the two reasons for this:

1. The chewing force squeezes the areas of non-fit into better adaptation with your teeth, which makes the aligner wrap over the teeth better.

2. The action of chewing increases the cellular activity around the root of the tooth, which is what causes the tooth to move. You have to get the cells to be active. Using chewies tends to stimulate that cellular activity and moves the teeth more efficiently. 

Aligner chewies are generally little pieces of sponge rubber, which come in multiple flavors as well. You can have plain, mint, strawberry, and orange. You can place them between the upper and the lower teeth and chew against them often in specific non fitting areas.

For those two reasons we already mentioned helping the aligners to fit in place and helping to stimulate the cellular activity, we might ask you to buy chewies. Sometimes we use other devices. But chewies are the most common thing we would use. We would generally suggest you do it three times a day for five to ten minutes a session. If this causes you discomfort of your teeth or jaw, stop this activity.

Here we have some teeth that are not fitting into an aligner and aligner chewies can help us in that circumstance. We have a goal to not have any gaps between the aligner and the teeth. So the aligner is closely adapting to the teeth and has been too little where the tooth can escape from the control of the aligner. The tooth won’t move properly and the longer treatment goes on the further that we took it out of place. 

In some cases it may actually be necessary to back up to an older aligner, in which the gap is very small or not visible and then gradually move forward again the aligners using chewies. If we back up to old aligners, we might not have to wear each other liner for two weeks to get the tooth back in place. But we might. So we need to monitor this closely at this stage.

After the aligner fits well there’s always a good idea for some days of healing to be allowed for before we move to the next aligner. If some teeth are not moving or for some reason they’re considered challenging, you may also be instructed to bite on chewies without the aligners in. This will also help to stimulate the activity for that tooth. It accelerates the subtle tooth looseness associated with tooth movement and increases the chances that otherwise stubborn tooth movements will be achieved. Aligner chewies are a valuable tool to help us to get your treatment to a smooth and speedy conclusion with an excellent outcome.