Body Expert arranges dental treatment in Istanbul for British patients, and clear aligners are the one thing we tell people to have done at home. The reason has nothing to do with the standard of Turkish clinics or with the aligners themselves, which come from the same manufacturer wherever they are prescribed. It has to do with what the treatment is: a course of supervised tooth movement that runs for 6 to 18 months after the trays are made, not a procedure that is finished when you fly home.

That course has a rhythm. The trays are worn 20 to 22 hours a day, a new set goes in at home every 7 to 14 days, and the person who prescribed the plan needs to see the teeth in a chair every four to ten weeks, which is the interval the British Orthodontic Society gives patients for orthodontic treatment generally. A three-day trip to Istanbul buys the scan, the treatment plan and the first trays. It does not buy the year that follows, and that year is where aligner treatment succeeds or comes apart.

Malocclusion treatment moves teeth, jaws, or both, until the upper and lower arches meet in a stable and comfortable position. Four routes exist, and the choice between them is settled by one question: whether the problem lies in the position of the teeth or in the size and position of the jaws that carry them. Tooth-level problems respond to fixed braces or clear aligners. Jaw-level discrepancies in an adult need orthognathic surgery combined with orthodontics. Narrow upper arches in a growing child can be widened with a palatal expander. Missing or broken-down teeth that have let the bite collapse call for restorative work instead.

Not every misaligned bite needs correcting. Malocclusion affects roughly 56% of people worldwide according to the meta-analysis by Lombardo et al. (2020), which pooled 77 studies, so a textbook bite is the exception. Treatment is indicated when the bite interferes with chewing or speech, when the discrepancy between the jaws is significant, or when it is measurably harming the teeth and gums.

This article sets out how a normal bite is defined, how the types of malocclusion are named, what the condition genuinely causes and what it does not, each treatment option with its documented limits, and how NHS eligibility works in the UK.