A massive summary of the best of my blog for 2017

In this post I have made a list of the most popular blog posts from this year. If you have time you can look back and re-read them or have a look at some that you missed.

I have been doing this blog for three years now and the readership has grown dramatically. Over the past few months my posts have been read over 45,000 a month. I think that, with luck, this may increase 50,000 this month. This graph shows how readership has increased per year.

The posts are now translated into several languages and we have a high level of hits in Brazil, China and Russia. A group of French orthodontists recently joined the translation team and this is great news.

Changes this year

I introduced an app in September and this has been downloaded 1200 times. It is completely free and I think that it is the best way to read the posts.

I also managed to persuade several other people to write guest posts and they were very popular. I will repeat this again next year.

We hope that everyone finds this to be a useful resource. It is a bit of work but I really enjoying doing it.

Anyway, thanks for reading my blog and here are the top 10 most popular posts from 2017 in reverse order.

The top 10 posts

Another nail in the coffin of the non-extraction obsession: a new study

This post was about a study that looked at the effect of extractions on facial profile. It caused a lot of discussion and a lot of this was objections to the title!

Careful with that cone-beam: It does not seem to make a difference?

The development and evaluation of new technology is an important role for research. This post was based on a paper that showed that the use of routine CBCT views did not make a real difference to treatment decisions. The discussion again was wide ranging. It also gave me a chance to reference a classic Pink Floyd track.

Which is better a bonded or vacuum formed retainer? Here is a new trial.

I wrote this post to have a close look at a new trial into retention methods. A team from the North of England did this study and I thought that it provided very useful information. I have referenced the North of England several times and people have asked is it similar to the North in Game of Thrones. Yes, it is but we do not have dragons…

The end of self ligation: or is it?

This was a review of another study on self ligation. It still surprises me that people claim that self ligation speeds up treatment. The answer is simple “it does not”.

I have decided to invent a new form of treatment: 24 month braces revisited

I revisited one of my earlier posts and posted this. It still managed to cause controversy and there were many comments.

Which is better Invisalign or fixed appliances? Does this study help?

I do not usually write about retrospective studies, but I thought that this was interesting. It is also a reflection of the lack of high quality research that has been done into Invisalign.

Lets talk about FastBraces

This post was about FastBraces. I got 38 comments that I could publish. There were about another 20 that were not publishable. Have a look at the comments. They tell a good story.

We need to talk about Myofunctional orthodontics..

We had a good chat about this one. There were 82 comments. They provided a great insight into this type of treatment. Again, these were the publishable ones. The comments from  Director of search of Myofunctional Research were very interesting…

Let’s talk about Acceledent

This was an old post from 2015 and it is still being read many times a week. I think that it has been picked up some patient groups. It is my most read post and has been read over 30,000 times.

The most popular post this year was

What’s going on with Invisalign?

I wrote this in early December and it has been read 18,000 times. In this post I discussed the new Invisalign store.

I feel that this has been a good year for my blog and I hope that it can continue to grow and provide information to you. I hope that you have a good holiday season. In the UK we have a very long Christmas/New Year break and I will post again in early January.