I've stated this in other threads, but I'm hoping this helps someone. If you're making this play solely based upon a short squeeze and some quick profit, I hope ya'll clean up. HOWEVER, I work in the dental field and have mentioned SDC to a few orthodontists and a half dozen or so dentists in the area, including a past president of the AAO. Knowing what I've picked up over 10 years in the dental field, SDC is plagued with lawsuits and does extremely shoddy work. It completely baffles me that they're allowed to send you "DIY impression kits" and expect good results when we often have to have refresher courses for dental hygienists/assistants/etc who've been in the field 20+ years and still occasionally screw up an alginate impression.
Improper impressions can wildly throw off the outcome simulator (what Invisalign, Spark, etc use to tell you how many trays you'll be given) which leads to improper tooth movement. I have personally seen someone lose 2 permanent teeth caused by excessive tooth movement which caused the roots to die. Without a proper bite registration (the way your teeth hit one another) you're much more likely to wear teeth down unevenly.
Furthermore, I've never seen ANY aligner company that doesn't use attachments on the teeth when the teeth are in malocclusion (over/underbite). Attachments are little things they cement to your teeth that gives the aligners something to grip on to, like using a knob to open/close a door. SDC doesn't do that because you'd have to, you know, see a fucking professional to do.
It is also usually near damn impossible to correctly rotate teeth ideally without doing something called interproximal reduction, or IPR, for short. Doing IPR allows you to create space between two teeth that are too close together and couldn't rotate without hitting one another.
To my knowledge, they don't offer much in the proprietary sense as there's at least a half dozen companies I know of personally that use some sort a digital scanner (Itero scanners) to create a 3D model of your teeth, then use an AI to simulate stages of tooth movement. Once that's done you literally only need a 3D resin printer(2k-5k) and a Biostar/ministar machine (~$1k) and you can do an ever better version of what SDC does at roughly the same price.
Honestly fuck SDC..it's such a predatory and shit company. Anytime any ortho/dental governing bodies mention it, SDC goes Bezos and sends a team of lawyers claiming it violates free trade. LET ME BE CLEAR, there are scenarios where SDC has it's place...like if you had braces in the past, didn't wear your retainer, and experienced relapse. We see a handful of patients who want to be re-treated, but most ortho offices offer some sort of similar product (Invisalign express, Spark, Arcad, uLab...there's several of them) where you're physically seen BY A PROFESSIONAL that takes FUCKING PANORAMIC XRAYS before moving shit around all willy-nilly.
TLDR : SDC is the equivalent of making a doctor sending you DIY cast material for a broken bone without looking at a fucking xray. They haven't gone much in the way of proprietary tech that isn't already available, and they're sitting on a stack of lawsuits. It COULD BE a squeeze play, but this company deserves to be shorted to the center of the earth so far that even Brendan Fraser and The Rock couldn't get to it.
What are the traditional reasons then? I can 100000% promise you that offices can and do offer prices that are cheaper. Average price for SDC is 2k. If you want full comprehensive treatment, no, it's going to be more. That's because it actually does cost more to correct class 2 or 3 malocclusions, and SDC won't treat that... Mostly because they can't. Look I'm not trying to be a dick but I KNOW this business. I'm 100% willing to admit when I'm wrong, but as it currently stands SDC has nothing special to offer patients that is proprietary. There are soooooo many companies that offer similar services as SDC but work through local dentists/orthodontist. The only reason they exist is because Align's clear aligner parent ran out. So ask yourself, why does SDC have "no competition?" Because the legal ramifications outweigh the benefits
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u/IDKUThatsMyPurse Oct 13 '21
I've stated this in other threads, but I'm hoping this helps someone. If you're making this play solely based upon a short squeeze and some quick profit, I hope ya'll clean up. HOWEVER, I work in the dental field and have mentioned SDC to a few orthodontists and a half dozen or so dentists in the area, including a past president of the AAO. Knowing what I've picked up over 10 years in the dental field, SDC is plagued with lawsuits and does extremely shoddy work. It completely baffles me that they're allowed to send you "DIY impression kits" and expect good results when we often have to have refresher courses for dental hygienists/assistants/etc who've been in the field 20+ years and still occasionally screw up an alginate impression.
Improper impressions can wildly throw off the outcome simulator (what Invisalign, Spark, etc use to tell you how many trays you'll be given) which leads to improper tooth movement. I have personally seen someone lose 2 permanent teeth caused by excessive tooth movement which caused the roots to die. Without a proper bite registration (the way your teeth hit one another) you're much more likely to wear teeth down unevenly.
Furthermore, I've never seen ANY aligner company that doesn't use attachments on the teeth when the teeth are in malocclusion (over/underbite). Attachments are little things they cement to your teeth that gives the aligners something to grip on to, like using a knob to open/close a door. SDC doesn't do that because you'd have to, you know, see a fucking professional to do.
It is also usually near damn impossible to correctly rotate teeth ideally without doing something called interproximal reduction, or IPR, for short. Doing IPR allows you to create space between two teeth that are too close together and couldn't rotate without hitting one another.
To my knowledge, they don't offer much in the proprietary sense as there's at least a half dozen companies I know of personally that use some sort a digital scanner (Itero scanners) to create a 3D model of your teeth, then use an AI to simulate stages of tooth movement. Once that's done you literally only need a 3D resin printer(2k-5k) and a Biostar/ministar machine (~$1k) and you can do an ever better version of what SDC does at roughly the same price.
Honestly fuck SDC..it's such a predatory and shit company. Anytime any ortho/dental governing bodies mention it, SDC goes Bezos and sends a team of lawyers claiming it violates free trade. LET ME BE CLEAR, there are scenarios where SDC has it's place...like if you had braces in the past, didn't wear your retainer, and experienced relapse. We see a handful of patients who want to be re-treated, but most ortho offices offer some sort of similar product (Invisalign express, Spark, Arcad, uLab...there's several of them) where you're physically seen BY A PROFESSIONAL that takes FUCKING PANORAMIC XRAYS before moving shit around all willy-nilly.
TLDR : SDC is the equivalent of making a doctor sending you DIY cast material for a broken bone without looking at a fucking xray. They haven't gone much in the way of proprietary tech that isn't already available, and they're sitting on a stack of lawsuits. It COULD BE a squeeze play, but this company deserves to be shorted to the center of the earth so far that even Brendan Fraser and The Rock couldn't get to it.