How do braces work?

Every day, we rely on a substance that's harder than iron or steel, our teeth. So if teeth are harder than steel, they must also be harder than bone and if they're harder than bone, then why does your jaw, which is made of bone, not crumble under all that pressure? There's a bit of tissue called the periodontal ligament, or PDL, around your teeth under your gums, The PDL is a shock absorber cushioning your jawbone from all the chewing forces. But what if your teeth come in all funky? Funky teeth can interfere with the way you talk and the way you eat. So how do we fix this? Well, we basically break our mouths with braces, except it's actually our bodies that do the breaking. The PDL has these cells called mechanoreceptors and when these cells detect a force on your teeth that's too big like if you accidentally bite into your fork, they signal the brain to stop biting down before hurt yourself. Braces tether your teeth, pulling them together or pushing them apart. Either way, they're applying a steady force to your teeth and when mechanoreceptors in the PDL sense this kind of smaller but sustained force, they signal cells called osteoclasts to the area, which spew out acid and proteins to dissolve parts of your jawbone. The pH of osteoblast acid is 6 or less. Then the mechanoreceptors signal osteoblasts to come and those cells deposit minerals that make bone. Osteoblasts rebuild the jawbone in a new shape that lets the PDL hold teeth in the new position. So braces basically force your body to dissolve itself and then rebuild itself your body is actually breaking down and rebuilding bone using osteoclasts and osteoblasts all the time not just if you have braces bone remodelling is just the way our body grows the infant body replaces almost all of its original skeleton by the time it's a year old and it happens throughout our entire life 10% of my bone material is technically new since last year we manipulate the bone remodelling process to not only get straighter teeth but also to treat diseases like osteoporosis which make your bones very brittle. By keeping overactive osteoclasts from dissolving the bone so much, or by boosting osteoblasts to produce more bone, drugs can prevent bones in those patients from breaking so easily. People with severe bone injury have to rely on bone transplants, where they take bone from other parts of their body and move it to the damaged area, which is sometimes not even possible and is always painful. This one example of how our body uses acid not just for digestion.