Special message from Dr. Gorton During Covid-19 Shelter-in-Place Order
Special message from Dr. Gorton
Hello, everyone!
Dr. Jasmine Gorton here. On behalf of the entire Gorton & Schmohl team, I wanted to send you and your families warm greetings and well wishes! Hopefully you and yours are doing your best to stay healthy and taking all the necessary precautions to keep others safe as well!
While we are all feeling the impact of the timing of the Covid-19 shelter-in-place order, please rest assured that your orthodontic treatments will continue as planned and largely without issue.
For our patients in braces, your wires will continue to straighten your teeth. Our recommendation to you is to continue maintaining excellent oral hygiene practices (making sure you use the Clinpro 5000 fluoride toothpaste you received from us) and also maintain a healthy braces-friendly diet! Please reference the braces food list you received, which is also on our website, and steer clear of hard, sticky, overly chewy foods that could cause things to come loose.
If you are wearing rubber bands as part of your recommended treatment, please continue! We’d like to see how you’ve done with your rubber bands and what your bite looks like so there will be some instructions later on in the video about how to take pictures of your teeth that we can use to evaluate your current bite.
For our Invisalign patients, you should have by now received all the aligners in your current set, as our office team has been mailing those out as they have become available. We encourage you to continue with wearing your aligner 20-22 hours per day, using your chewies regularly, and using your accelerator device daily if you elected to purchase one.
If you feel that you are going to be running out of aligners in the near future, we recommend slowing down your pace. If you customarily switch your aligners twice per week, which is the case for some of our youngest patients using Invisalign with Acceledent, you may want to switch once a week for the time being. If you usually switch your aligners weekly, you may want to slow down to every two weeks if you think you may run out soon. If you usually switch every two weeks, please stay with the same schedule of aligner changes.
Finally, if you’ve reached the last aligner of your set and have worn it full-time for a couple of weeks, please switch to night-time only with your last aligner so that they can hold your teeth in their current position. Please don’t stop wearing your aligners! And, as always, please do not throw away any backup aligners you may need if your current aligner breaks or gets lost!
For those patients with expanders, please stop turning after the prescribed number of turns has been completed. Please do not continue turning after the prescribed number of turns until you have submitted evaluation photos for assessment of progress.
While we are only seeing emergency patients in our office at this time per the recommendations of all governing health care bodies at the local, state and national levels, we want to reassure you all that we are available by phone, text, email, and video.
If you’ve subscribed with our dental monitoring program, please continue your weekly scans for evaluation. For everyone else, we’d like to extend an invitation for a virtual appointment for all our Invisalign patients due for a check, our braces patients who are currently wearing rubber bands, and expander patients who were still turning their expander when the shelter-in-place order started so that we can check-in and evaluate your progress.
We also want to let you know that we have virtual consultations available on our website for new treatment interest and inquiries. We have a video coming up from Lindsay, our Treatment Coordinator, demonstrating how to take photos of the teeth easily at home to help us with our assessments. You are welcome to email your photos to all three doctors at [email protected] with any questions or concerns you may have.
Click here for Lindsay’s tutorial on how to take photos of your teeth
Click here for Covid-19 FAQ
Click here for Cornonavirus Updates
Orthodontic Instructions During Covid-19 Shelter-in-Place Order
