Discontinuing clients is a process! While you might know when to discontinue a braces client, you might still need to learn how to discontinue Invisalign clients for noncompliance. Poor oral hygiene, such as not brushing and flossing, is rare for Invisalign clients, but just because these cases are infrequent doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be prepared for them as providers.

Decay from wearing aligners while eating and drinking can be severe, and patients who continue to engage in this behavior are at risk of causing serious harm to themselves. Additionally, other circumstances with aligner noncompliance can be tricky.

So, can you discontinue these patients? Absolutely! Let’s go over how to enforce compliance and discontinue treatment if compliance standards are not met for Invisalign.


Informed consent is key in treating Invisalign patients, which should already be a standard part of your practice. This aspect of treatment includes clearly outlying how to care for aligners, when to wear them, and information on keeping up with oral hygiene. To enforce this information, many providers choose to use compliance contracts to allow them to move more clearly toward discontinuing treatment if patients are non-compliant.

If these measures are not working, and you have a patient who is damaging their teeth, you must communicate to them that the health of their teeth is more important than their alignment and bite. Explaining this to patients from an ethical point of view is the easiest, as patients have a basic understanding of the responsibility of providers to do no harm.

From here, as a provider, you would not move forward with giving this patient trays, offering them to take a break to work on their hygiene skills, or stopping treatment altogether. Sometimes, you may have to break up with the patient, but this decision will be in their best interest.