In South Africa, any registered dentist may legally offer braces. A specialist orthodontist is something different: a dentist who went back and spent four further years studying one subject only, how teeth, jaws and faces grow and move.
Before you choose who treats your family, it is worth two minutes to understand what those four years contain.
Here is the comparison Dr Essop offers patients, and it lands because it is simply arithmetic.
years of clinical training covering the whole of dentistry, every discipline, theory and clinical work combined. That is the qualification that permits someone to offer braces.
additional years on orthodontics alone. The theory, the research literature, the history of what has been tried and abandoned, and above all four years treating real patients full time under senior orthodontists.
One subject, four years, against a share of five and a half years spread across everything. There has to be a difference, and there is.
A BCom before dentistry, nine years in practice as a general dentist and several published research papers before a scarce registrar post opened, then the four specialist years, which he. He is registered as a specialist orthodontist with the HPCSA, registration DP0093483, and holds UK registration through the GDC examination besides.
His full storyThe visible difference between a specialist case and a shortcut is not the braces. It is everything around them.
A specialist case starts with full records and a diagnosis before anyone touches a bracket.
It considers how the teeth meet and function, not only the teeth that show in a photograph.
Teeth pushed beyond the limits of bone and gum do not stay healthy or stay put.
Rather than a routine of changing wires and hoping.
And it is planned personally: Dr Essop traces his own x-rays and builds his own treatment plans, then takes responsibility for steering the case to the result.
Who diagnosed the case, and from what records? Is the plan treating my bite or only my appearance? What happens if something does not go to plan?
Whoever answers those well deserves your confidence.
When Dr Essop’s own daughter needed treatment, her case was significant: a Class II bite with real crowding in the lower jaw. On paper, extractions were a defensible answer, and he knew the research shows extractions done properly cause no harm. He still could not bring himself to take healthy teeth from his own child, and he did not want surgery for her either.
So he treated her the harder way. Using a modern anchorage appliance, a Beneslider, developed by the German orthodontist Benedict Wilmes, he moved her upper teeth backwards to correct the bite, and managed the crowding with small, precise, controlled adjustments instead of extractions. Three years on, her result is stable.
If I would not accept this for my daughter, why would I prescribe it for anyone else?
That is now the standard here. Not extraction-free dogma, extractions are still right for some cases and he will say so, but a genuine effort, case by case, to reach the best result with the least intervention. Fewer extractions. Modern alternatives, TADs and distalisation appliances, that can spare borderline cases from jaw surgery. Always with the face, not just the teeth, in mind.
Specialist orthodontist, verifiable on the HPCSA register.
MChD (Orthod), University of Pretoria, .
South African Dental Association · American Association of Orthodontists · World Federation of Orthodontists
Bring us your questions, or another quote you are unsure about. You will get a specialist’s honest reading either way.