Jaw Surgery

Dr.David C. Hoffman - Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery School of Dentistry: NY Univ.- College of Dentistry Residency :Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery Univ. Texas Health Science Center Parkland Memorial Hospital

Jaw Surgery Male1: An oral surgeon does more than just pull wisdom teeth, you get involved sometimes where the jaw could be too small, too big, the bite could bit you off, how are you involved in the surgical when something is wrong with the jaw? Male2: Say children or a young teenager is going to the orthodontics; every now and then they come home with a perplexing problem that the orthodontist is maybe a surgical situation. What that means is that the bones, the upper and lower jaw of the patient, let us just look at this model if we could. The upper and lower jaw, this is the upper jaw and the lower jaw, the maxilla, and the mandible are sometimes a misfit. The maxilla is too big, too small, the mandible is too small, I think every has seen somebody that looks like your lower jaw looks like it just never grow or their upper jaw is so big that they walk around looking, where we see all their teeth or even when their lips are close or situations where peoples face were crooked. Any kind of these problems are known as a jaw malformation and the treatment for it is a term called Orthognathic surgery. Now that is a pretty complex word but what it means is it is a surgery that is done on the jaws to correct the bite and a way in which the jaw is fit together. Lower jaw could be too small or too big or the upper jaw could be too small to too big. I think, think of the person that you might think of has the worst case of back teeth in the world, where when you se them, well, you see there teeth, their gums, or that when they bite down, there front teeth just do not catch it good. Male1: So the approach to a jaw that is too small, can it be extended? Male2: Exactly. In an adolescent or in a teenager, you can extend the jaw or make it small. You can do the backwards and forwards and with the upper jaw in backwards and forwards. Now that type of surgery, surgical orthodontics has really jumped on the technological age because when I say that is in an oral surgery opposite mine, we can take in a matter of really five minutes or 10 minutes we can take pictures, we can take a CAT scan and we put all these in a computer and show their—and get back within a few days computer imaging, models that look just like this and correct somewhat, figure out before we even do anything. What type of surgery they need and do a computer more things and that means that I can actually figure out how the person is going to look after the surgery. And I can balance between looking at a face, or the soft tissue were an actual—looks like the picture of a person and with a couple of switches on the computer I can see the underlying bone and then I can move the bones on the computer and then see what that does to somebody’s face and really has been a technological breakthrough in treating people. Male1: It is pretty reliable then. Male2: Very reliable. And you know, you really get to what we call sculpturing the patient’s face not only can you correct their bite but you can take someone that would otherwise have, or the better term with funny looking faces. We just give them just a normal looking face. Male1: So you can correct the four conditions we mentioned before either by putting some extension or you will reduce the size of jaw to some degree, so it matches properly with the maxilla and the mandible. Is that correct? (Audio cut)